Descriptions:
Video Description
A symbol can hold a textbook meaning and a living one at the same time, and the pentagram is a perfect example. Lyam Christopher begins this video by confessing how often newcomers arrive worried about good and evil, because the first stop on the path into the deeper soul is usually the realm of morality. The pentagram, he says, carries far more than that first story, and working with it slowly reveals a reality behind the symbol that words struggle to reach.
The history glows once it is opened. During the Renaissance, Christian scholars searched Kabbalah for proof that Jesus was the Messiah, and they added a single letter to the old divine name. What was Yud-Heh-Vau-Heh became the Pentagrammaton when the letter Shin, a small flame at the top, was placed into the middle. Five points for the five elements, and in the Golden Dawn numbering the pentagram belongs to Mars, whose sphere is five, not Venus as a certain famous novel claimed.
Then he brings it back to the practical mystery. The pentagram is made by tracing a line against or along the sun’s path, and that direction, he says, is how a symbol can build or unmake. The joy is that the image stops being a spooky decoration and becomes a tool with a direction, a shape that speaks to the very forces of nature. The preparation for deeper systems like the Enochian work is laid out in Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation, but this video makes the first symbol feel alive and within reach.
Full Video Transcript
all right it’s time for another video this is about the pentagram what you guys might notice
is that the common knowledge surrounding various symbols in the occult tends to be very textbook
and as you begin to work with them you start to experience the reality that’s sort of behind them
that cannot easily be conveyed through words or through your studies okay so we’re going to talk
about both of those kinds of knowledge today and i’ll do my best to try to convey what the
pentagram actually seems to do versus what it’s kind of been um fictionalized to do okay and both
of those are important because um fiction is the nature of reality actually all right see if i can
get my slides to work here all right so the power of the pentagram symbol of good and evil as many
people come to the occult, it still surprises me, it shouldn’t really, but people come to the occult
and the mysteries worried about whether magic is being used for good or for evil, and there’s a
lot of, I guess when we start to get into the finer things about life, the first stop on the
way into the higher level realms of the soul, let’s say, or the deeper levels of the soul,
the first stop is in the realm of morality and so uh and that’s why you know religion among the
common people among the common masses is normally um a discipline of good and evil like basically
just an instruction manual for for how to be a good person and so if you’re going to be becoming
more spiritual more magical the first stop on the way towards that is sort of this this obsession
realm of what’s good what’s evil okay and the pentagram uh in in part represents that it’s
kind of like um if somebody goes into buddhism buddhism in its hour court or in its beginning
teachings um talks about the world of cause and effect as though the world of cause and effect
is real this bumps into that and produces a result and people learning buddhism for the first time
will proceed according to these laws of cause and effect, because it’s one of the Four Noble
Truths, supposedly.
But as one gets further on into Buddhism, let’s say, then as a practitioner, he or she
will begin to notice that cause and effect does not really exist, at least not the way
it seems to exist.
And then that person will turn around and look at all the people who are beginning to
learn Buddhism and say, oh, you believe in cause and effect?
You still believe that?
don’t believe that anymore and this realm of cause and effect that we tend to believe in you know is
sort of the realm of hard knocks where evil and good supposedly exist remember evil kind of beats
you up and you have to fight back because you’re good and you know but uh realm of karma right so
um the pentagram kind of uh suffers from that a bit okay we’ll talk about that um and maybe try
to get beyond the idea of the pentagram as a as a means of banishing evil spirits okay um there’s
nothing wrong with that but you have to remember there’s a deeper inner side to that so we can
start off by um quoting alifas levy um much of what the golden dawn developed was kind of propagated
by him first. He is pre-Golden Dawn, and so supposedly one of his books, Transcendental
Magic I think is the title it tends to go by these days, presented a lot of fanciful
notions about hermetic magic and things like that. That’s where the Baphomet image first
appeared apparently drawn up by him um and uh so a lot of the things he presents there are sort of
fanciful reflections on what he knew about the mysteries and you can see that he doesn’t write
very directly or very clearly but what i want to point out here is when he talks about the pentagram
he’s actually talking about it the way it is but the way he’s talking about it here it can be
interpreted on two levels like the outer version of it where it’s like oh yes it strikes fear into
the hearts of evil spirits or baser spirits or something like that right and um and yet there’s
another level from which to regard this okay so let’s look at this i think that’s why eliphas
levy when i first read his book transcend transcendental magic that’s the title it goes
by nowadays um i didn’t much care for it but now when i look at it again i was like oh my god he’s
kind of writing on two different levels and so you look you read it as an outsider and you are
drawn into this sort of good and evil universe and then you read it as an insider you’re like
oh he’s not necessarily talking that way all right the pentagram expresses the mind’s dominion
of the elements demons of air spirits of fire specters of water and ghosts of earth
so automatically this idea of dominion over the elements okay uh that some kind of symbol can be
used to subject them to your will as though you are above them and whatnot that’s a very handy
way of looking at the pentagram okay but um what we’re going to talk about in this video is
how it derives that mistaken authority over the elements okay which has always manifested to
elementary and other spirits a power superior to their own superior above them right naturally
striking them with fear and respect and enforcing their obedience by the empire of knowledge and
will over weakness and ignorance um and so if you want to think about the animal kingdom uh
if someone is on higher ground than you then they have a tactical combat advantage over you
okay if a predator is above you they have an advantage over you and they can pounce on you
from above uh like if you’re playing dungeon the dragons it’ll give you a plus one to hit if you’re
on higher ground or something like that right so um uh so this idea of being above people and rank
also makes you superior but that’s really tuning into primordial imagery of being
on top of somebody and pinning them down or hold it controlling them or having the tactical
advantage over them and also when you’re on higher ground you can see more you have more overview
oversight okay and that’s kind of what that’s tuning into so when we talk about getting to a
higher spiritual level in magic we have to be careful with that word higher because it gets
confused with these social hierarchies that are largely conditioned by combat imagery or prey and
predator imagery okay and so the world of the initiate though is not necessarily superior
in regards to combat or competitiveness okay even though yeah being an initiate does seem to give
you some you know advantages um because you proceed through the world without uh needing
to defend yourself anymore you know there’s a lot of when people proceed in the world of cause and
effect and the world of good and evil they are they have a lot of armor and it takes a lot of
energy to maintain that armor and they walk around in this world of defensiveness which takes a lot
of energy for them to maintain so yes it tends to make you weak if you’re not an initiate if you
haven’t dropped your armor yet not that an initiate doesn’t have armor because they can generate
the same kind of social shells that other people do but they don’t do it compulsively and
exhaustingly okay and so that’s that’s a really cool point to put forward because the adept is
someone who can still create all these neurotic caricatures and operate in the world according
to the various roles that we play but the adept is not somebody who compulsively does that and
they can drop it at will they can adopt it at will and they can adopt it they can drop it at
sort of like a method actor and that’s the secret behind invocation anyway so this idea of
the pentagram striking fear into incorporeal spirits okay we’re going to talk about the
real secret behind that hopefully it will be mind-blowing but before that we’ll go into
some of the standard attributions of the pentagram maybe dispel some of the myths about it i don’t
know and as anybody knows when they first start to read about occultism they will know that oh
the four elements are attributed to the pentagram and the pentagram shows the presidency or the
superiority of spirit over the four elements okay some people would say the spirit is the secret
fifth element that’s not really a good way of looking at it because since spirit is the essence
since all of the elements are basically manifestations of spirit, spirit is then not
really an element of itself, if you know what I mean. So all of the four elements are basically
outward faces of the one element, which is spirit. Okay, so already you can see that the pentagram
is a bit of a misleading symbol because spirit should really be on the inside and the four
elements would be on the outside. So, you might even say that the cross is a better symbol of
the quintessence, the spirit, because then when you look at a cross, like an equal arm cross or
a Christian cross, at the center of the cross, that’s where the spirit angle is, and then the
four arms of the cross are then the four elements, okay? And the nice thing about the pentagram
is that it becomes a symbol of fascination and we’ll talk about how that tends to exert an
influence over spiritual beings like ourselves and the four elements that were attributed to
that the air on the left the water on the right the earth and the fire down below
that was a golden dawn innovation now eliphas levy said that the pentagram symbolizes spirit
and dominion over the elements but as far as i know he did not attribute any particular element
to any particular point and as far as i know it was mcgregor mathers or maybe westcott they had
the two of them together um in the golden dawn they are the ones who decided oh okay on the
upper left is air on the far right is uh water okay we they apparently got that from the wheel
of the zodiac okay but there’s another source also that kind of confirmed it for them okay so
in the wheel of the zodiac we’ve got air uh as the sign of aquarius water as the sign of scorpio
fire as the sign of leo and earth as a sign of taurus those are the fixed signs of the zodiac
and those four signs make a cross in the uh on the wheel of the zodiac okay so if you look at
astrological chart you’ll notice that air is uh directly opposite fire and water is directly
opposite taurus is directly opposite of scorpio okay and and um aquarius is directly opposite of
leo okay so the cross would be a better symbol really if you think about it for the quintessence
but the pentagram was very important in occultism and it’s also a symbol of fascination
uh and so those points were attributed to those the elements were attributed to those points
apparently because they resembled the zodiac okay now there’s another system of magic
the enochian system of magic okay and this is something that um the kabbalah magic book
prepares people to practice if it’s something that um you want to do uh because uh the enochian
system of magic was considered the crowning jewel of Golden Dawn occultism. And in the system of
Enochian magic, which was discovered, channeled during the Renaissance by Dr. D and Edward Kelly,
by John D and Edward Kelly, the great table of the elements, it was not really the great table
of the elements at the time but you’ll see in the upper left you have the color for air which is
yellow on the on the right you’ve got blue and then down below to the left you have black for
earth and then we have red for fire okay now those elemental colors and elemental attribution
attributions were given to this great table of the enochian system those elemental attributions
were given to the enochian system apparently by the golden dawn that’s a golden dawn innovation
i tend to believe that too and uh but it wasn’t done arbitrarily because in the enochian system
the uh the air the upper left quadrant there was for the east and the upper right quadrant
was for the west and the lower left quadrant was for the north and the lower right quadrant was for
the south okay and then so east and all these elements so um and in the golden dawn system
east was for air west was for water north was for earth and south was for fire and so it fit
pretty well that they could just plop these elemental attributions upon the enochian system
now if you know anything about magic if you’ve been relatively experienced many people say well
that’s not correct that’s not what a nokian system was originally designed to do so you have to
remember that when you’re working with these apparent spiritual forces what you’re really
working with is the the soul of the world or the psyche and the psyche apparently likes to
communicate with us we are literally expressions of the psyche we are literal personifications
of the psyche it has bodied us forth as expressions of deep forces within the universe okay and we are
fantastic symptoms of deeper forces, actually, if you think about it, erupting into the material
world. And we ourselves can then look at the material world and see these forces erupting
into physical manifestation. And as we do that, what we can eventually recognize is that as you
look deep into the psyche, the psyche likes to have meaning systems imposed upon it, because
it’s kind of like it’s invisible and it wants to be visible but it needs some clothing to put on
for you so it can come out and show you its shape if that makes any sense okay so when you have all
these sort of fanciful systems of magic and you say well it sounds arbitrary they’re just assigning
things here and there first of all it’s not arbitrary you know there’s an there’s an elegance
to it and second of all even though um some of these attributions were created in a spirit of
audacity like let’s just do this you know let’s just let’s just apply the elements to it and see
what happens um what we find is that the psyche or the soul of the world enjoys having systems to
work with okay so when you have a system of magic so much the better because then the psyche has a
means of communicating with you okay and as many of you are beginning to understand that’s why we
study tarot and that’s why we study the tree of life that’s why we study astrology so we have the
symbols of the psyche available to us uh that we can overlay them upon the world so that the
deeper aspects of the world can come forth and speak to us in terms of that system if i use some
kind of asian system maybe that’s different that’s fine too it also has an elegance to it
that has been um skillfully applied over time okay you can’t just be like the chaos magician
and say anything goes i can just apply any kind of symbols anywhere and then eventually the psyche
will speak to me maybe but it’s much better to have a a system that is naturally formed over time
okay so usually if somebody says oh i just made a new system of magic all on my own i’m like
yeah so i mean it might work but it’s it’s why would you do that when you have all these deep
embedded imageries embedded in our cell memory that are crying to be expressed and released
you want to speak to them in the terms of those archaic images images okay so it’s very important
to use these old imagistic forms so that you can conjure forth the deeper aspects of the psyche
that’s why magic tends to use archaic old symbols because those old symbols have been
burned into the psyche over countless millennia and the psyche has learned over those countless
millennia just speak in terms of those primordial images okay it’s really cool to use systems of
magic simply because they’re antique and old but yeah that’s not really the point we use these old
images because they are they have embedded themselves deeply in the human psyche and we
can pull aspects of the collective psyche out into our current generational reality here wow
I just spent a long time explaining that. Excuse me. So, we have the pentagrammaton also. So,
according to the four element system, we also have the letters of the tetragrammaton,
which is Jehovah, let’s say, right? The name of God. And so, the old name of Jehovah from the
old testament represents the sort of crazy god of that um of the old testament which is kind of
jealous and um and does uh kind of insane things with miracles and the elements and all that kind
of stuff right um and it’s kind of an angry god all this right and eventually um during the
Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, as Christians tried to prove that Jesus really was the Messiah,
they went into Kabbalah and then found all these interesting things to try to make the point.
And they basically added an extra letter to the Tetragrammaton. So, you have Yud-Heh-Vau-Heh,
which spells Jehovah. But they say, well, when you add the letter Shin to that, which is up above,
looks like a little w right when you add the shin to that it becomes yud he shin vau he if you read
that from the bottom right to the upper right to the tip of the top and then down to the left and
then down to the lower left that’s yud he shin vau he yaheshua or if you believe it jesus okay
so and they would say that um the letter shin comes into the tetragrammaton and um redeems the
elements so without the letter shin at the very top the elements are kind of crazy and they’re
kind of just running all over the place willy-nilly doing crazy stuff right jealousy exists anger
exists all these you know forces bouncing back and forth beating each other up those exist when
the four elements are ungoverned by spirit which is at the very top okay and adding that letter
shin to the tetragrammaton gives us yeshua or jesus okay not only does it do that but it also
gives us yehovah shah which is another version of the pentagrammaton pent means five right
tetra means four this is the four letter name of god then there’s a five letter name of god
and in the golden dawn since golden dawn is basically the christianized version of kabbalah
because it’s based on the italian renaissance hermeticism right uh then um the pentagrammaton
is um used to exert exert to exert authority over the elements okay so yeshua is normally used to
make things, and Yehovah Shah could be said, you could use that to unmake things. And what you’ll
notice is if you read the Hebrew letters, if you read them counterclockwise here, it’s Yehoshua.
If you read them counterclockwise, it’s Yehovah Shah. So Yehoshua is Yud-Heh-Shin-Vau-Heh.
Yehovah Sha is Yud-Heh-Vau-Shin-Heh, okay?
And if you take this pentagram and you flip it so that it’s pointing down into the earth
or into the hell realms, right?
If it’s pointing down, it’s face down, then if you trace clockwise, then it’s Yehoshua.
And clockwise is normally associated with the direction of making things
because it’s the direction that the sun travels in the northern hemisphere and so in the human
mind supposedly that when things go clockwise things are being generated and created in the
world and when things go counterclockwise it’s contrary to the course of the sun contrary to
nature and therefore things are then unmade if you go counterclockwise okay so that’s basically
why clockwise is considered making and counterclockwise is considered unmaking and what
you’ll notice is that many when people first start magic they say oh clockwise is good and
counterclockwise is evil no no it’s just that basically when we think of things being unmade
it’s like they’re being destroyed okay so that that’s where the evil and good comes from at
least in the pentagrammaton thing okay so or or in the terms of clockwise and counterclockwise
you might even see that there’s some old buddhist statues where the same symbolism applies if you
see the swastika on the forehead of jesus and if the swastika appears to be whirling
clockwise it’s a blessing abundance blessing sort of thing right it’s creating sort of thing
if it’s clockwise then it’s a meditation symbol where the buddha is unmaking himself through
meditation he’s going back to the source okay so this counterclockwise clockwise thing
remember that the counterclockwise and clockwise thing it only really applies to the making of
circles not to the drawing of the pentagram okay same thing for the hexagram it doesn’t matter
with the hexagram in fact if you draw the universal hexagram it kind of goes both ways
it’s all zigzaggy, right? So the counterclockwise and clockwise principles really only applies to
circumambulation, like walking around the center of your magic circle, right? Or drawing circles
around things. To make things, you draw clockwise. To unmake them, you draw counterclockwise, okay?
So it’s not necessarily good and evil. It takes a while to realize that, and I think that’s why in
the Golden Dawn, we always walk clockwise, no matter what we’re doing, until you eventually
realize what counterclockwise really means. The pentagram also represents the golden ratio. This
is really cool. So the golden ratio is an irrational number, very much like pi. I believe
it’s pronounced phi. So the golden ratio is pronounced phi. Maybe somebody can correct me
in that. And just like pi is 2.1415926 and on and on and on, right? The golden ratio is also
an irrational number like that and it the decimals just go on and on and on and there’s no pattern
there it’s it it appears to be random there’s no um repeating um sequence going on uh it’s an
irrational number and what we find is the golden ratio appears all throughout nature it appears to
be the governing a governing principle for dna itself okay i’m not sure how the ratio applies
to dna but the the double helix apparently is appears to be like sort of governed by this
mathematical principle of the golden ratio not that i believe that mathematics governs the universe
or that the universe is governed by laws that’s just a way of it’s just just a way of speaking
about things okay so i don’t think that there are laws out there that boss us around or anything
like that it’s more like these laws are repeating patterns and it’s helpful to speak of them as
though they govern things or determine how things manifest. And so the pentagram appears
most commonly to our sight, the way that we see things, in vegetation. So we look at the patterns
in leaves. The golden ratio is a very common mathematical proportion that we see in the
formation of plants like flowers and leaves and things like that. But it also applies to many
other things to the human form apparently like the portions of the human face and if
you measure the human head to the rest of the body something I forget how it works or
even the arm itself if you measure the arm I forget what it is I think it’s the hand
the length of the hand compared to the length of the forearm which is also 1.618 ratio okay
might even be true. And during the Italian Renaissance, this was a known thing. And
supposedly, one of the principles behind the incredibly intense beauty of the art of the
Italian Renaissance and architecture was the golden ratio. All right. So, and the pentagram
is a perfect embodiment of the golden ratio. So, the principles behind DNA and life itself
are shown forth in the pentagram and just to give you an example the length of that purple line
or mauve whatever color that is right the raspberry colored line
the ratio of the blue compared to the purple line is 1.618 the ratio of the green let’s see yeah the
green line to the blue line is also 1.618 and the ratio of the green line
compared to one of the black lines the full black lines is also 1.618 and so
this appears to be a kind of crystalline mathematical principle and the our DNA
itself is a liquid crystal so you might wonder why do occultists revere and use crystals so much
well aesthetically they they apparently represent the crystalline nature of life itself yeah so the
pentagram perfectly embodies this principle so one of the governing principles of the pentagram
supposedly is Mars, because Mars has the number 5. For those of you studying Kabbalah, the number
of Gurbura, the sphere of Mars, is 5. And for anybody who has watched the Da Vinci Code or
read the book The Da Vinci Code, the pentagram is introduced as a symbol of Venus. What? That
would be the number 7. And so people got confused by that. I thought number 5 was for Gurbura,
well apparently the pentagram represents both mars and venus outwardly it represents venus
it represents venus in when you see a rose this five petaled flowers are supposedly governed are
more harmonious to both mars and venus because of that and if you look at the tree of life
mars has a position opposite of venus and for those of you who are the few of you who are
who are in the Philosophus grade, you’ll notice that there are two planets that you invoke
regularly. One of them is Mars and one of them is Venus. For those of you in the Theoricus grade,
there are two planets that you invoke regularly. They are Mercury and Theoricus grade is the Moon
and Saturn. And these are opposite each other once again on the Tree of Life. Okay. It’s kind
of like the principle that’s hidden inside venus is mars really and um if you recall from the
earlier goddesses of love like venus um they also were uh goddesses of war and even when venus
became sort of softer in mythology she was still responsible for starting wars like in in uh the
trojan war was caused because of venus or aphrodite you know basically she’s the one who
enticed paris into running away with helen of troy and started the war so very interesting
stuff going on but the main attribution probably in magic to venus is for those who studied
astrology and they recognize that whenever venus um aligns with the earth when it’s closest to the
earth every time it gets closest to the earth it it marks a particular point in its orbit i’m not
sure how they recognize this when but basically what happens is um over time it forms a perfect
pentagon let’s say in it in the orbit every time it overtakes the earth it’s because it’s orbiting
a little bit faster it we mark a point and that when that happens five times it keeps happening
over and over again in the form of a pentagon okay and of course if you connect the dots then
it’s a pentagram okay uh and it’s nearly a perfect five-pointed star as long as you connect the dots
in your imagination okay so venus also uh has this correspondence to the pentagram so it’s both
it’s mars and venus and one of the prime symbols primary symbols of the golden dawn is the rose
the rose cross and the rose that is formulating in the middle of the cross as a symbol of
incarnation we’re going to come back to that the the idea of incarnating because pentagram is a
symbol primarily of incarnation so is it a symbol of evil well no i think this happened in like the
was it the 17th century where there was an occultist who decided to invert the pentagram
or basically said ah yes when it’s like this it’s with the it represents the beast
and that’s fine i guess right um and the golden dawn actually you know adopted that too and um
the golden non sort of sort of winked at it though because for those of us who still think that the
pentagram can be inverted we’re kind of in the outer order or in the outer court of the golden
dawn because it’s like well evil is real and you know and i have to be aware of evil forces and
blah blah blah all these things right but eventually um i think that’s why the golden dawn
frowned upon inverting the tarot cards because this whole idea of inverting uh is really
very much an exoteric idea it’s an it’s not for initiates i would say and so um yeah when
initiate sees the pentagram it’s just like who cares if it’s upside down still the spirit um
it’s a symbol of the quintessence no matter which way you turn it if you adopt the false belief
that spirit can be dominated by matter uh that’s that’s your problem you know spirit cannot be
dominated by matter because it is the essence of matter itself what you could do is see that um
when you look at if you look at an egyptian pyramid the pyramid itself the substance of
the pyramid represents spirit and the four facets or the four faces of the pyramid facing outward
are the four elements and the four elements are really just outward appearances of spirit they
are not the actual substance of the universe itself of course if we’re not initiates we think
we think of everything backwards we think that oh the elements are the foundation and somehow we
have to launch ourselves into space to try to reach spirit somewhere when in fact spirit is
the essence of the elements and that’s the big thunderbolt that strikes us eventually when we
realize that oh we have been trying to get somewhere i already am because spirit is simply
what i’m made of spirit expressing itself in the four elements so this idea that spirit can be
dominated by matter is it’s really for the non-initiate okay and this uh this inverted
pentagram comes from uh what is it the satanic bible i think it is right uh and the hebrew
letters here represent just leviathan it’s leviathan spelt out in i guess counterclockwise
yeah and um but kind of what that means is you have this hermetic idea of good and evil
where good and evil really doesn’t exist we can come back to that in a second
and uh there’s the gnostic idea of good and evil where we’re in the gnostic viewpoint we are
trapped inside matter and we are being lorded over by these horrible forces that are you know
torturing us and condemning us into suffering and and i don’t know it’s like we’re working in their
factory or something like that and they’re horrible overseers who are making us suffer
the archons right um from the standpoint of the initiate that’s perfectly fine but of course
if you live in a world that’s governed by harsh conditioning it will seem as though
there are horrible forces lording over you and exploiting you and making you suffer and laughing
about you and things like that right and from the standpoint of somebody who’s an initiate that’s
not what’s happening that these are basically not archons they are let’s say you know archangels or
planetary angels who are simply dispensers of the force of manifestation and they are conveying the
energy of the divine upon the physical elements creating the world that we live in if we look at
that world in an ignorant way then it feels like we’re trapped here and we’re being victimized by
it if we look at it in terms of initiates it’s like more like oh i am this stuff i can actually
participate in the creation of my life okay and i can actually learn to surf with reality instead
of try to fight the entire ocean let’s say right okay so the hermetic good and evil then kind of
doesn’t exist but we could say when you are an initiate there still is a type of good and evil
and it simply is anything that keeps you from discovering that good and evil doesn’t exist
could still be considered evil because it’s resisting your initiation process right and
anything that supports your idea your ability to initiate yourself anything that helps you with
that would be then considered good okay so it’s like a meta good and a meta evil that still exists
oh i like that meta evil um it still exists in um the hermetic uh universe even though it’s a
relativistic concept it ultimately is not real it does not exist all right now we come to the dark
some explanation of the pentagram it is a symbol of the microcosm okay the symbol of the macrocosm
is normally considered to be the hexagram okay these are very important symbols in golden dawn
magic the hexagram is simply a configuration of planetary forces as they appear on the tree of
life let’s say and essentially what the golden dawn magician is learning to do is embody the
planetary forces consciously within the sphere of the elements and that’s why when you do the
lesser bandaging ritual of the pentagram you’re working with the four elements all around let’s
say the four directions of space right and then the middle of that is the pentagram and this that
sorry the hexagram and the hexagram represents eventually what you’re going to be using which
is the planets to manifest planetary virtues within the sphere of the elements okay anyway
so this idea of the pentagram it represents a human figure so bear with me as i explain this
idea it’s kind of weird um if you are a disembodied spirit let’s just say that you if that’s true like
you can die and become a disembodied spirit and then you’re waiting to reincarnate again right
um as you’re floating around in a sort of as in a vaporous apparition form or in a dream world where
you don’t really have a solid body and you basically can morph into all kinds of forms right
you are eventually going to get fascinated by something that represents what you once were
before okay and so chances are you were probably some kind of creature that had two arms and two
legs or four legs let’s say right four legs and a head or two arms two legs and a head okay so
in an abstract form the pentagram represents the um the general life principle governed by the
golden ratio the life principle that’s going to draw you back in to another quadrupedal animal
form so it’s almost as though you’re floating around in the astral and then some angel draws
a pentagram upon the air and you’re like what’s that and you get sucked into it and suddenly you
get pulled in and suddenly you incarnate into a a form that has a head two arms and two legs
it’s like oh i’m back okay and that’s a weird idea isn’t it the reason i’m presenting it is
because it’s eventually what comes out as you’re doing the work and then you um i’m not the only
only person who’s talked about this um kind of relationship um alistair crowley spoke of it as
well and i think it was maybe wait who also talked about i’m not sure arthur edward wait i think
might have talked about it as well and so there’s this idea in the um in genesis of the bible where
adam and eve are kicked out of paradise and of course in occult circles that is that’s believed
to be humanity incarnating in a physical form so supposedly um adam and eve when they’re in the
garden in the garden garden of eden that’s really the astral plane okay that’s one way of looking
at it okay and uh when they got kicked out of the garden they were they were then forced into um
physical form and that’s why when they when they look at themselves and they see that they’re naked
and they’re ashamed it’s because they’ve descended into physical bodies and they’re like oops we made
a mistake we fell for we saw some fascinating image of a pentagram and we jumped into it and
we became human forms oops and now i’m stuck here for a while in a mortal form for a while right
and I’m learning these harsh lessons okay so that’s that’s the equivalent of being kicked
out of the garden and so we got people like Alistair Crowley and Arthur Edward Waite saying
that well the the flaming sword that the cherubim wield to keep us out of the garden they say well
they’re waving that flaming sword it turns every which way right they’re they’re turning that
they’re waving that sword in the form of a pentagram and it’s that form that keeps us in
physical manifestation it keeps us in this form of a head two arms and two legs right supposedly
right and um so it’s that power that keeps us but trapped in this form so it can be considered
a symbol that’s sort of terrifying and evil because it basically sentences you to a lifetime
in a body where you’re facing all these forces and it could be very difficult um it’s not difficult
for all of us, let’s say, right? But yeah, life is pretty tough from time to time, right? And
that’s terrifying to spiritual forces, right? And the interesting thing is that this is the way the
pentagram functions in ritual. It tends to act as a personifying symbol. So, we draw it in the
four quarters because we are sort of teaching the spirits of the north, the spirits of the south,
the spirits of the east, and the spirits of the west. We’re teaching them that, yeah, you can
manifest to my waking eyes you can take on dream forms for me or something like that you can say
and this is the this is the symbol that supposedly beguiled me into becoming a physical entity
and you can now come forth in some kind of pleasing form to me and talk to me as an animal
or as a human right um and also the pentagram is the way back out of this form so we have invoking
pentagrams and banishing pentagrams and we have the principle of making and
unmaking through the pentagram okay so that’s one of the secrets of the
pentagram it sounds a bit fanciful to say well it vaguely remember resembles a
human form therefore it has symbol of incarnation you have to work with it
because there seems to be a profound reality to it and the depth of
profundity and the depth of fear associated with the symbol can be
explained in part by that sort of logic that this is an incarnation symbol it’s
a symbol of incarnation and disincarnation and so we could even say
that the Angels taught Adam how to do this himself like he had a system of
magic which is supposedly Kabbalah and then he was able to use the pentagram to
command spirits of nature or things like that right well yeah i find it interesting too because
i once saw some kind of satanic website where they the the author of that site was trying to
convince the audience that um uh hell or a tartarus of the greek myth that tartarus was
shaped like a pentagon but i tried to confirm that and i really didn’t couldn’t find any sources
that confirmed that the original idea of Tartarus was in the form of a pentagon or a pentagram.
But it’s a very interesting idea because the pentagram is seen as a symbol that locks things
into physical form, being a symbol of incarnation, that is. And also a symbol that can then dissolve
those forms back into the ether again okay um it doesn’t make much sense logically but you have to
remember that the psyche doesn’t function logically it functions mythically so these
correspondences actually do tend to work on the level of the psyche and you can use of course the
psyche has a profound influence on the way you experience the physical world and then hence we
have magic all right if you guys want to discuss this further um those of you haven’t joined me on
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somebody who has been through the process himself. Or you can also schedule a consultation with me
if you like. Okay, and there’s a link for that underneath this video. All right, so looks like
the computer system’s working properly. All right, so until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher