On Liber V vel Reguli

Liber V vel Reguli – the “Book of the Princes” or “The Ritual of the Mark of the Beast” – is, in Crowley’s words, “an incantation proper to invoke the Energies of the Aeon of Horus, adapted for the daily use of the Magician of whatever grade."

On first glance, the ritual looks something like a “Thelemicized” version of the Supreme (aka Greater) Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram. On deeper inspection, this ritual is an enactment of Thelemic cosmology that functions by dramatizing the LAShTAL formula. It thus expands and deepens the Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram as the Star Ruby does the LBRP.

The ritual is a symbolic means of saturating one’s consciousness in a “Thelemic” view of the world, as summarized in the word LAShTAL. It thus indeed “invoke[s] the Energies of the Aeon of Horus” in the truest sense of those words. No supernatural energies are stirred by this ritual: as in the LBRP and Star Ruby, the mechanism and effects are purely psychological. As Crowley put it in Magick in Theory and Practice, “The sincere student will discover, behind the symbolic technicalities of this book [i.e. behind the symbols of ritual magick], a practical method of making himself a Magician. The processes described will enable him to discriminate between what he actually is, and what he has fondly imagined himself to be.”

In what follows I examine the performance and function of Liber V by reading it against the essay Crowley appended to it.

You should consider reading my articles on the LBRP and the Star Ruby as preliminaries to this article.

If you intend to perform Liber V, I recommend a solid grounding in the standard pentagram rituals first and some significant experience with invoking.

Read on for more.

Invoking the Holy Guardian Angel

Last year, a comment on my post about the Middle Pillar Ritual led me to write a short essay on the process of invoking the Holy Guardian Angel. I recently reread it and thought that I would make a post out it.

Presented below is my essay with some minor modifications. The impetus for writing it was a question about whether the Holy Guardian Angel (or HGA) is an external being or not. As I state in the essay, this question is explored very thoroughly by Erwin Hessle's excellent essay on the subject, which concludes that the HGA is most definitely not an external being. Interested readers may also want to peruse this link and this link and this link for more details about what is meant by True Self and True Will.

Read on for more.