The Invocation of the Headless One

The Bornless Ritual is an invocation used in Western ceremonial magic, addressed to a "Bornless" or "Headless One", a supreme, self-existent divine power, and employed to assert the magician's spiritual authority and to invoke a higher self or guardian. Its text descends from a genuine artefact of late antiquity: a Greco-Egyptian magical papyrus of the early centuries of the common era, known from the collection of Greek magical papyri, which preserves an exorcistic invocation of a headless god, the akephalos. This ancient rite of ritual power was rediscovered and translated by a nineteenth-century Egyptologist, adapted into a ceremonial working by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and given its enduring place in modern magic by Aleister Crowley.

The title's "Bornless" renders the Greek word for "headless," the epithet of the god invoked in the original papyrus; in the magical reinterpretation it was taken to mean the unborn, uncreated and self-existent, that which has no origin because it is the origin of all. The invocation proclaims the identity and authority of this power and, in the magician's recitation, associates the operator with it, so that the rite functions both as a preliminary purification and empowerment and as an assertion of spiritual dominion over lesser forces.