I’m no newbie to the LBRP, but to be honest until maybe halfway through 2024 I completely sidelined a lot of my magical practices (barring the occasional geomancy chart or tarot draw or whatever, or the odd bit of veeeery minimalist magic). I’ve recently felt the pull to re-engage with my spirits insomuch as I can. One way I’ve been doing this for the past few weeks has been trying to implement the LBRP as a daily practice. Do I think it is the panacea many people believe it to be, the only ritual anyone need know? Of course not. Is it a simple and yet effective format? Yes.
The LBRP is one of those things which is simultaneouslt omnipresent and yet also probably not practiced half as often as people would let on. I think many people have done it at least once, but I also think many people do it not many more times than that. For some the format just doesn’t appeal for them, certainly for pagans and Wiccans and anyone else not necessarily in love with an Abrahamic cosmology there are some obvious aspects of the structure which might not sit right with them. And yet I think that something of the skeleton of the practice does work its way in to many of these circles.
Lots of people have reskinned the absic principle with their own Godnames, substitutions for the Archangels etc., for better or for worse depending on your perspective. I’ve done it myself at one stage or another. There is something about the LBRP though which I feel comes across as unfashionable, especially to a new practitioner. For the witchy types, again the judeo-christianness of it all isn’t much appealing, so as a tool it might never even cross their radar, instead opting for other tools to do the same thing which fit their genre of magic. For ceremonialists or magician types, although having its own logical consistency and being applied within GD workings of older texts, it isn’t inherent to them and in that sense may feel superfluous.
I might write about other aspects of it at some stage, but one of the big foundational aspects of this and similar rituals is assignment of the elements to the directions. To some the directional attributions might seem arbitrary, particularly because in the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram uses a totally different set of directions. However, the ritual has a fairly sensible logic to it that I don’t ever really se expounded upon (or at least I had to figure it out myself, it may well be in one of the old books I’ve never taken the time to read).
Logic of the Directions
This was for a time something I took unreasonable issue with trying to figure it out, however the logic of it is in actuality quite straightforward. The four classical elements are contrasted from each other in a number of ways in Western occult practices.
Many people are familiar with the two axes of Hot-Cold and Wet-Dry, with each element having one of each, e.g. water is considered cold and wet, and fire hot and dry. Notably this extends beyond just physically what you can expect them to feel like and into more abstract terms, with heat really being more an analog for naturally expanisiveness, active nature, and in a gendered binary, the male force. Cold on the other hand corresponding to the passive, receding, inward looking, and the female. Probably best to view the masculine-feminine associations sort of like male and female in terms of cables and adaptors because to be honest that seems to be all that is meant.
As well as this, there is another level to this which is tying the elements to different levels of subtlety/density. You can see part of this in the various practices. Agrippa (and I would say most magicians/witches) consider fire to be the most “spiritual” element, with (citation needed) Agrippa writing that the mundane fire on Earth contains within itself an aspect of divine or celestial fire, and this being a bane for a number of spirits. On a more practical level you see this in the various bonfire rituals such as those held at Samhain where fire is used for exactly that purpose. In a biblical sense we also see fire strongly associated with the Christian God, in the burning bush of Exodus, as well as (also in Exodus) as a pillar of fire.
I might write a bit more on the elements just to summarise what I know in one place, but for the purposes of this I’ll rank the four from most to least subtle:
- Fire: The most subtle element as discussed above. The most expansive, bright/luminous, and also the only element which is not self sustaining in the way that the others are.
- Air: Note that the hot elements are considered more subtle. Air is primarily wet with its secondary aspect being hot, so it is placed the next down, also being less bright.
- Water: The other “wet” element. Considered along with water to be one of the “translucent” intermediary elements, allowing light to pass through it but generating none of its own. Also physically denser than air.
- Earth: The naturally most “earthly” element. Heavy, the only one with a naturally solid nature, and considered the darkest element. You would do well to note that the pentagram drawn in the standard LBRP is a banishing pentagram of Earth, which I feel serves the purpose of clearing out astral detritus at the closest part of the astral.
There are a lot of other reasons and justifications you could make, but a simple way of thinking of it is in terms of density. Water sits atop earth, air above the water, and fire (e.g. the sun and stars) above that.
What do these have to do with the directions, you ask?
Ye Bigge Sundial of Arte
I mentioned that the ritual of the Hexagram uses different elements for the directions. The TL;DR is that it uses astrological attributions from the four fixed zodiac signs, but I sort of think that both systems use a form of astrological correspondence to an extent.
In astrology, the ecliptic is the circle made by the apparent motion of the sun through the year, divided equally into twelve signs. For the Hexagram, using a zodiacal system makes sense because the ritual is used to invoke and banish planetary influence. Less so for the Hexagram. However, there is another aspect of astrology we can draw parallels to for the LBRP: the 12 houses (and also the ascendant and midheaven which are strongly related). These things are all much more microcosmic in nature – they are connected not to the cycle of the year as the Zodiac and ecliptic are, and not so macrocosmic, being instead related to the cycle of the day, and being strongly tied to the specific place a chart is cast; an astrological chart cast on the same day will have identical planetary positions in the zodiac (give or take maybe a degree or two for the moon I think? I think there is some parallax thing going on there due to its proximity), but the ascendant, descent, and upper and lower midheavens will vary considerably by location.
The Ascendant – East – Air
For those unfamiliar with astrology, the ascendant is the point along the Eastern horizon where the sun and all other astrological bodies rise up from, either at the start of the day or just whenever that happens to be for non-Solar objects. This is assigned Air in the LBRP, and I think considering it as the second most subtle of the elements,, being hot and of an expanding/rising nature), the direction where the day begins and rises, is increasing in brightness and heat, etc. is a natural place for it.
Midheaven – South – Fire
Moving clockwise we reach the South. Clockwise around the astrological Chart, we reach the midheaven. The midheaven is the highest point the Sun reaches in the day (and also any other planets), and so is associated with Solar Noon. Fire naturally belongs here, being the brightest and hottest of the elements.
Descendant – West – Water
I think at this stage it becomes self evident the logic of the directional attributions, but at this point we now see that in the same way as air rises up, water falls down (like rain). I think also of all the elements that water in the west has always made the most intuitive sense to me.
Lower Midheaven – North – Earth
This leaves us with Earth, in the North and with the lower midheaven. This time corresponds to midnight, the period when the Sun is as far below the horizon as possible (and also when it is physically beneath the Earth, and yourself, from your perspective).
I don’t know if the astrological link is maybe too much for most people and if people are just happy to accept the time of day logic – but I think for me the South and North attributions never seemed totally clear as to the logic for why one over the other without this, and I think this framework gives sufficient explanation for why, although even just following the circle clockwise will get you there also, but I think the astrological aspect gives a nice tie in to the Hexagram ritual, and particularly the micro-and-macro cosmic natures of each of these rituals.
