Names, Archangels, and Its Place in the Tradition

Having drawn the four pentagrams, the practitioner calls upon the four great archangels to stand guard at the quarters, Raphael in the east, Gabriel in the west, Michael in the south and Uriel in the north, and declares the six-rayed star within, so that the operator stands at the centre of a fully warded space. The whole draws its symbolism from the Hermetic Qabalah, the Western esoteric adaptation of Jewish Kabbalistic imagery, mapping the divine names, elements and directions onto a single ordered scheme.

The ritual was assembled by the founders of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century from older Qabalistic and grimoire materials, and it was popularised in the twentieth century through the published works of the order, especially the writings of Israel Regardie, and taken up by later magical currents including Thelema and modern ceremonial and pagan magic. Practitioners describe it as much a psychological and meditative discipline as a magical one, its daily repetition training concentration, visualisation and self-command; and the tradition regards facility with the LBRP as the prerequisite for all more advanced work, the banishing that must be mastered before anything may safely be invoked.