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As with all such rituals, you should begin by performing the Lesser Ritual of the Banishing Pentagram before proceeding.

 

 

Revised Lesser Hexagram Ritual

 

1. Begin by performing the Qabalistic Cross.

2. Extend your arms out from your body to form cross. Visualize a golden-yellow globe of brilliant light forming in your chest. Say: “At the center is Tiphereth—Yod Heh Vau Heh Eloah v’Da’at. At the center shines Sol, the heavenly sun—Schemesh. At the center stands the Cross of Light—Yeheshua.”

 

3. Form the Banishing (or Invoking) Hexagrams of Fire, Earth, Air and Water in the appropriate quarters, vibrating the word “Ararita” as you draw each.

 

4. When finished with the hexagrams, extend your arms in the cross form once more, and say: “Before me Tzaphkiel. Behind me Gabriel. At my right hand Tzadqiel and Haniel. At my left hand Michael and Kamael. Above me Metatron, below me Sandalphon, and within me shines the Cross of Light.” Visualize the cross of bright light running through your body.

 

5. Finish by performing the Qabalistic Cross.



In many ways, this revised hexagram ritual resembles the classic Lesser Banishing/Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram. Unlike the Golden Dawn hexagram rituals, which employ a hodge-podge of discordant symbolism culled from several diverse traditions, this hexagram ritual is based completely on Qabalistic symbolism. It is based on the planetary symbolism of the hexagram which can be formed on the Tree of Life, which takes Yesod for the basal point representing Luna and transposes Binah (Saturn) for the upper point. The other four points are formed from Chesed-Gedullah (Jupiter), Netzach (Venus), Hod (Mercury), and Geburah (Mars). The sun is at the center of the hexagram, in the position occupied by Tiphereth on the Tree. This ritual symbolically (and magically) places the ritualist at the center in the Sphere of Tiphereth, and surrounds him/her with the Sephiroth associated with the seven traditional planets and their archangels. It also crowns and protects the ritualist with the forces of Kether/Metatron and grounds him/her in Malkuth/Sandalphon.



The greater hexagram rituals, which are used to invoke or banish specific planetary influences, are a little more complex since they have to be oriented to the quarter of the heavens in which the planet appears at the time the ritual is performed. This would involve changing the order in which certain archangels are invoked in the ritual. I'll post instructions for these rituals as soon as I get time.

A Critique of "The Analysis of the Key Word."





(This is part of an article on hexagram rituals. I plan on expanding it and providing a bibliography of sources. But for now, let me know what you think of the rough draft. The revised hexagram rituals are completed--I just haven't had the time to put them online.)



I dislike the Golden Dawn hexagram rituals intensely because they utilize a very dubious 19'th century syncretism called "The Analysis of the Key Word." The "analysis" in question revolves around an acronym of the words which Pontius Pilate allegedly ordered his legionnaires to place over the head of the crucified Christ: "Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm." This translates into English as "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." The Golden Dawn's Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram reduces this Latin phrase to the familiar four-lettered acronym which appears over the head of Jesus in most traditional artistic representations of the Crucifixion: INRI. Then the Golden Dawn ritual converts each of these letters to their alleged Hebrew equivalents and derives the Hebrew letters ynry (yod-nun-reish-yod) which are further abbreviated into the three letters yod-nun-reish by eliminating the extra yod.



Fans of Macgregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, and other illustrious 19'th and early 20'th century occultists purport to find all sorts of esoteric significance in this procedure. But there are serious problems with such a superficial conversion of Latin into Hebrew. It is always dangerous to assume that a literal translation of terms from one language into another will retain the original meanings of those terms, and the "Analysis of the Key Word" definitely makes this assumption by presupposing that the letter R in the Latin word "Rex" can be meaningfully converted into the Hebrew letter reish. However, it is highly questionable whether a 1'st century Palestinian Jew would have reformulated the acronym in the fashion indicated in the Golden Dawn ritual. The Latin word "Rex," which means "king" in English, would most probably have been translated by most literate Jews as klm (pronounced "melech" or "melek") which begins with the Hebrew letter mem. The letter reish would have played no role in an authentic Hebrew translation of the Latin acronym INRI, and so the "analysis" provided by the hexagram ritual lacks meaningful linguistic validity.



The Golden Dawn's "Analysis of the Key Word" makes several other very questionable assumptions when it assigns ancient Egyptian deities to the Hebrew letters yod, nun and reish. The writer of this ritual (probably Macgregor Mathers) derived these associations from the astrological symbolism attached to certain Tarot cards which, in the Golden Dawn tradition, are assigned to the Tree of Life paths yod, nun, and reish. These cards are, respectively, The Hermit (associated with Virgo), Death (associated with Scorpio), and The Sun (associated with the sun.) The "Analysis of the Key Word" goes on to equate the Egyptian deities Isis with Virgo, Apophis with Scorpio, and Osiris with the sun. However, this whole procedure rests on very dubious presuppositions and incorporates major distortions of Egyptian mythology.



First, the Golden Dawn's assignment of Hebrew letters to the 22 Paths of the Qabalistic Tree of Life diagram is far from being universally accepted. There are many different arrangements, including much older ones designed by Jewish Kabbalah masters, which differ markedly from the system concocted by the Golden Dawn and which obviously stem from authentic branches of the Hebrew mystical tradition. Further, students of Western esotericism are in disagreement regarding how (or even if) the Major Arcana cards of the Tarot pack actually relate to the Hebrew alphabet or the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Prior to the 19'th century speculations of Eliphas Levi no one had ever hypothesized a connection between the symbolism of the Tarot decks, which had already been circulating around Europe for several hundred years, and the Hebrew alphabet. Many Tarot scholars today believe that Levi arbitrarily invented the whole thing, and relationships between specific Tarot cards and Zodiac signs also seem to rest on equally shaky foundations.



Second, the relationship between Egyptian deities and Zodiac signs used in the "Analysis of the Key Word" is utterly untenable. The Golden Dawn arose at a time when the scientific study of ancient Egyptian religion was less than a century old. None of the members of the Golden Dawn were Egyptologists, and so they obtained their knowledge of Egyptian religion from sources which are today considered to be hopelessly inadequate in their interpretations of Egyptian religious beliefs and practices. As an examination of the bibliographies of their published works show, many of the most influential figures coming out of the Golden Dawn and its many off-shoot organizations relied almost exclusively on the works of E. A. Wallis Budge for information on Egyptian religion, and unquestioningly accepted his broad generalizations and sweeping conclusions. However, when evaluated from the perspective of the extensive archeological data available today, it becomes evident that Budge founded many of his conclusions about ancient Egyptian religion on inadequate evidence based on superficial resemblances between extremely diverse groups of deities and cultic symbols. In relying so heavily on Budge, 19'th and early 20'th century Hermeticists (including luminaries like Mathers, Crowley, Waite, Fortune, and Regardie) all incorporate many naive misconceptions about ancient Egyptian beliefs into their systems.



The "Analysis of the Key Word" seems based on the same kind of superficial understanding of Egyptian religion that can be found in Budge's copius works, and forges equally specious connections between widely divergent dieties and metaphysical concepts. For example, it appears to equate the Zodiac sign Virgo with the goddess Isis merely because both figures are female and ethereal, and ignores other significant differences which clearly distinguish these two entities. The obvious fact that Virgo is represented as a virgin and that Isis had a husband and conceived Horus via sexual intercourse with the corpse of Osiris is conveniently overlooked. The Egyptians represented Apophis as a serpent, not as the familiar scorpion which the Egyptians themselves used to represent the sign of Scorpio in the Zodiac of Dendera and in other astrological representations. Apophis, identified as the "destroyer" in the "Analysis of the Key Word", was unrelated to the myth cycle of Isis and Osiris into which he is awkwardly thrown by the creator(s) of the Golden Dawn hexagram ritual. This evil cosmic serpent belonged to the myth of Re, whose boat he attacked each night as it reached the nadir of its journey through the Underworld. The real "destroyer" in the myth of Isis and Osiris is Set, the theriomorphic god of destruction who murdered his brother Osiris. Set was represented as a man with the head of a still-unidentified jackal-like mammal and never as a scorpion. Most significantly, the identification of Osiris with the sun made in the "Analysis of the Key Word" completely contradicts everything we know about this deity, who remained enthroned in his Underworld kingdom and never returned to the land of the living after his mummification and reanimation by Isis, Anubis, and Thoth. Although certain vignettes in the Amduat and other Egyptian funerary texts employed in the Valley of the Kings sometimes show a kind of mystical merging of Osiris with the solar god Re in the Underworld, it is Re alone who rises again on the Eastern horizon as the triumphant morning sun. Osiris remains forever a denizen of the World of the Dead, from where he magically animates all things planted in the earth and causes them to grow. He was a chthonic earth deity governing the cycles of vegetative growth, decay and renewal from his kingdom underground, and ruled over mummified humans who had been magically "planted" in his realm. To equate Osiris with the heavenly solar orb and the forces symbolized by the Tarot deck's Sun card is to distort the meaning of the Egyptian myths beyond recognition.



Finally, the creator(s) of the "Analysis of the Key Word" connect the Egyptian deities Isis, Apophis and Osiris with the Gnostic word IAO simply because that word is formed from the first letters of the Anglicanized versions of these god's names! This stretches the limits of credulity entirely too far. As in the case of many other ancient Middle Eastern/African languages, the written scripts employed by the Egyptians did not utilize any signs to represent vowel sounds. Since there are no longer any living speakers of the ancient Egyptian tongue, no one knows for sure how they pronounced the names of their deities, and the vowel signs we insert into our transliterations of ancient Egyptian words are the result of educated guesswork that may bear little or no relationship to the pronunciations actually used by the Egyptians themselves. The relationship between IAO and Isis, Apophis and Osiris is completely ad hoc, as is the alleged relationship between these deities and the Latin letters L, V, and X which is also assumed in the "Analysis of the Key Word." I can only speculate as to why the creator(s) of the Golden Dawn hexagram ritual believed that LVX stood for Isis, Apophis and Osiris, as there seems to be no evidence given anywhere in the literature to explain or support this derivation. Perhaps the association of L with the goddess Isis is based on the superficial resemblance between the symbolic headgear she wears in artistic representations (which is also the hieroglyph for the word "throne") and this letter. It is conceivable that the letter X was associated with Osiris because mummiform depictions of this god always show him with his arms crossed over his chest in the same position adopted when making the Golden Dawn's "Sign of Osiris Slain" (in which the arms are used to make a kind of X over the chest.) How the letter V can be seen to represent Apophis is more difficult to fathom, unless the shape of this letter is supposed to suggest the head of a snake.



Golden Dawn initiates, Thelemites who employ a very similar version of this ritual, and other Hermetic students may all object that my criticism of the "Analysis of the Key Word" misses the point. They may argue (perhaps correctly) that this ritual was never meant to be taken as having an historically demonstrable etymological basis, and that its whole purpose is to bring about a certain state of consciousness in the people who perform it. And this ritual probably is impressive and effectively moving to those who do not specialize in the study of Egyptian religion, the Hebrew alphabet, or the vocabulary of the Greek Gnostic tradition. Personally, however, I happen to feel silly when performing it, even though I'm far from being an expert in Egyptian, Hebrew, or Gnostic studies. I feel like I'm doing a bizarre, Hermetic version of The Village People's 1978 hit song "YMCA"--one in which I convert the individual letters used in the name of the song into the Hebrew letters ymca (yod-mem-chet-aleph), associate them with The Hermit, The Hanged Man, The Chariot, and The Fool of the Tarot deck, and then convince myself that I see all sorts of abstruse, esoteric relationships between ancient Egyptian religion, the Zohar, Gnostic Christianity, and late 70's pop music. It just doesn't work for me. It reminds me too much of the kind of delusional thinking which characterizes the clinically paranoid patients at my clinic who see hidden references to bizarre conspiracies in every insignificant accidental event.



After this little iconoclastic exercise, where can you turn to find a more historically grounded version of a hexagram ritual? I believe that authentic spirituality, in order to be authentic, must possess intellectual integrity and honesty. Please don't think that I'm criticizing the intelligence or sincerity of anyone in the Golden Dawn or any other organization which employs the "Analysis of the Key Word." As stated above, it may very well be the case that this alleged "analysis" was never intended to stand up to historical analysis in the first place. It may have been intended as a work of art--as a kind of Hermetic surrealism--which juxtaposes incongruous elements from diverse traditions in order to shock the mind into a different level of perception. But, as with surrealistic painting, a given individual may either love it or hate it. And if a person has a negative reaction to the apparently arbitrary connections employed in the "Analysis of the Key Word," it will not work ritualistically for them as a method of enhancing spiritual awareness. Nobody can delude themselves into "believing in" a ritual which they suspect is based on silly nonsense and still maintain that they are attaining a higher state of consciousness through using it. Such willful self delusion is diametrically opposed to true enlightenment. Therefore, I've designed some hexagram rituals which I believe are based on legitimate research into the Kabbalah and are therefore also capable of satisfying the intellect (in addition to whatever else they may happen to satisfy.)



I'll post these revised hexagram rituals in the "Spells" section of my journal as soon as I can.