MODULAR THEURGY

Over the years, there has been a variety of cross-pollination between the various traditions of Western Goetia, Evocation, Voodoo, and Hoodoo. Particularly interesting is the use of veves in Voodoo, a practice which we can attribute to Spanish Catholics exposing the African Americans to Goetia in the 1600's and 1700's.  Santeria makes use of statues of Catholic Saints to represent its African gods. In ancient Greece, there is the theurgic tradition of using statues as well. Within these temples or shrines, the effigies were said to move and speak to the faithful. (Jake Stratton-Kent examines this in his excellent 2 volume work, Geosophia.)

Many years ago, I came up with the idea to work in a similar manner as in Santaria, but rather with classical Greek and Roman statuary. It would be challenging and prohibitively expensive to make a statue for each spirit or angel I had ever worked with, but this is what I wanted to do. Meditating on the idea, I came up with a solution, which was that I would only make seven statues, one for each planet.

What makes the Inner Order of the Golden Dawn system different from other older traditions, is the introduction of modular tools. In the Golden Dawn, (or more correctly, the RR et AC tradition), certain flashing colours are employed to represent planetary and other astrological forces. For example, the Adept can use the Lotus Wand to invoke the astrological forces via the coloured bands or grips. If I was to make up statues of the planets, I could use them to invoke the various gods, angels and spirits, but in a modular fashion. For example, all the Venusian characters, such as YHVH Tzabaoth, Hanael, Kedemial, Astarte, Aphrodite, etc., could be invoked in a theurgic manner into a statue of Venus as a material basis.

There first problem with this new formula was that I wanted to be able to use it for seal-based evocations as well as theurgy and the sigils would result in concentrating the sephirotic or planetary energies too specifically into certain names, which I knew would result in mildly kelipotic manifestations when I tried to switch pantheons. In the old order, some of the Adepti experimented with making a second set of elemental tools but without sigils, so I made the assumption that by extension these statues could also be left somewhat plain, to accommodate a variety of names for the one force being employed. This overcame my first concern.

The second problem is the cleansing of the statue between entities.  Thankfully, the Inner Order Z2 for evocation presents a highly effective license to depart and then banishing formula that doesn't appear elsewhere in magical literature.

Depicted above is a photo of one of the deities I have worked with. It is a statue of Venus, after the Botticelli painting. For more information, see my book Adept Magic in the Golden Dawn Tradition, which may now be pre-ordered from the publisher Kerubim Press.