I’ve been really considering both the Pentagram & Hexagram rituals from the Golden Dawn, Thelema, and This ritual is underrated and can be used much more than it is.
The RP is a complete elemental evocation system in and of itself. With a proper understanding of the Pentagrams, you can banish, invoke, or do any banish/invoke combination you care to do. You can also call elemental forces, or use elemental gateways as portals to call higher planetary and astrological beings.
I don’t think there’s a magician alive who has truly mastered this one formula, it is so versatile. With permutations and variations on how many chakras you open in the Kabbalist Cross and how many quarters you petition, you can do the RP 16,384 different ways without repeating your structure. This doesn’t count the mix of banishing and invocation permutations, which would take this number into hundreds of thousands of RP variations.
There are levels to the Pentagram ritual, and the RPs can be adjusted to banish, evoke, invoke, convoke, or petition forces as well as the Watchtowers. You can skip calling the quarters and speak directly to the Watchtowers if you wish. The formula is modifiable when you properly understand it and use it with creativity.
In the Golden Dawn system, the RPs are the LRPs (Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram or modifications such as Michael Snuffin’s New Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram), GRPs (Greater Rituals of the Pentagram), and SRPs (Supreme Banishing and Invoking Rituals of the Pentagram).
In Thelema, the RPs are the Star Ruby, vel Reguli, and Samekh. Thelema also has altered invocation forms to specific forces, such as NV (Nuit for women) or HAD (Hadit for men), which are unique possession rituals done to prepare the Thelemite for different forms of devotion or sex magick.
The 18 Enochian elemental calls are an elaborate version of elemental and subelemental conjurations. Understanding how to structure these calls will make you a savvy formula user and properly stage your use of the RPs in GD and Thelema.
All forms of the RPs activate the magnetic Brain field (called the Operant Field in Western Magick) to different levels of sophistication.
This would be dazzling and frankly quite confusing if the different RP forms didn’t have a simple and similar underlying structur to unite their disparate formats:
1 - The opening Kabbalist Cross is the act of opening, rotating, and balancing the 5 chakras of the Kabbalist body of light
2 - The Formulation of the Pentagrams is the act of conjuring any number of the quarters.
In most iterations of the RP, most of us banish or invoke all four quarters sequentially. This is a basic and uncreative way of using the RP. There’s nothing stopping you from conjuring (invoking) only one, two, or three quarters in any combination you care to. A more careful way of doing this is to invoke one, two, or three quarters while banishing the rest. This makes the RP into a full-on evocation ritual.
You also have the possibility of conjuring NONE of the quarters and proceeding to the next step…
3 - The Invocation of the Archangels is a direct acknowledgment of the presence and powers of the Royal Stars of Persia.These stars are called and petitioned in the RPs of all traditions under code names, but their star origins are rarely given. I give them here for the sake of reference. Removing the ciphers they hide behind, the Watchtowers are stars that represent the highest elemental attributions of each quarter. Again, we call all four of these stars, but you may conjure or banish the properties of one or any combination of these stars as you see fit.
What is not written in the RP instructions is that you give your commands and requests to whatever forces you call in the RP. So for example, if you banish the West, you explain what you are banishing in the Western elements. If you conjure or invoke in the South, you name the spirit, natural object, or whatever have you that you are conjuring with attributions to whatever element you place in the South. Etc. Once you’ve called or sent the forces you name, their elements and properties are active in your Brain field.
4 - The closing Kabbalist Cross is the act of rotating, balancing, and closing down the 5 chakras of the Kabbalist body of light. It’s a form of shutting down your work.
With an understanding of the different processes that you follow within the RPs, you can put together many simple elemental evocation rituals of power, and repeat them to build your elemental spiritual connection up over time.
This weekend was a real eye-opener for me in realizing just how powerful and useful these Pentagram rituals really are, and how to get power results out of them.