Liber Samekh

This is a ceremonial magic ritual text authored by Aleister Crowley (writing as "the Beast 666"), composed circa 1921 at his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. It is a Thelemic adaptation of the ancient Greco-Egyptian "Bornless Ritual" (also called the Headless Rite), reworked as a structured invocation for attaining "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel" — the central initiatory goal of the Abramelin magical operation. The text proceeds through five elemental sections (Air, Fire, Water, Earth, Spirit), each built around a series of "barbarous names" — untranslatable voces magicae from Greek magical papyri — which Crowley annotates with his own etymological and Qabalistic interpretations, rendering them as invocations of solar-phallic divine forces tied to his system of Thelema (featuring figures like Satan, Babalon, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit). What makes it distinctive is Crowley's theological commentary, which reframes the ritual's climax not as a traditional mystical union but as an explicitly sexual-magical "orgasm of the operation," where the Holy Guardian Angel is identified as the magician's own perfected unconscious self — the "Spiritual Phallus." The accompanying rubrics argue that this new-aeon formula replaces the Osirian death-and-resurrection model of initiation with a solar, growth-based model centered on Horus. It is primarily of interest to scholars of Western esotericism, Thelema, or the history of ceremonial magic.

Liber Samekh

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