The Invoking Pentagram Ritual

The Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram (LIRP) is a Golden Dawn ceremonial procedure that actively calls the forces of the four elements into the ritual space, working in complement to the more widely known Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Where the LBRP clears and empties the space of elemental influences, the LIRP fills it with them, creating a charged and active elemental environment suitable for workings that draw on these forces. Together the two pentagram rituals give the practitioner precise control over the elemental quality of their working space.

The LIRP follows the same basic structure as the LBRP: the practitioner moves through the four quarters, traces pentagrams, vibrates divine names, and calls the archangelic guardians. The key difference lies in the direction in which each pentagram is traced. In the LBRP, the pentagrams are drawn in the banishing direction (for Earth, beginning at the lower left point and drawing upward to the apex); in the LIRP, the same pentagrams are drawn in the invoking direction (beginning at the apex and drawing down to the lower left). This directional difference is understood to reverse the energetic function of the pentagram, calling rather than clearing.

History and origins

The pentagram rituals were developed within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century, systematising an understanding of the pentagram as a magical symbol with directional valence rooted in older magical and Neoplatonic traditions. The use of the pentagram to represent the elements, with one point for each classical element and the topmost point for Spirit, had been present in Western occultism since at least the Renaissance. The Golden Dawn formalised this into a working system of invoking and banishing pentagrams for each element.

Israel Regardie’s publication of the Golden Dawn’s secret documents in the 1930s and again in the 1980s made the pentagram rituals available to the broader occult public, and they have since been adopted and adapted by practitioners across a wide range of traditions including Wicca, chaos magick, and eclectic ceremonial practice. The LBRP in particular has become one of the most universally practiced rituals in modern Western occultism; the LIRP is less universally known but equally important within the system.

A method you can use

The LIRP is typically performed after the LBRP has cleared the space, or as a standalone procedure when the practitioner wants to call elemental forces rather than clear them.

Begin in the east. Stand at the centre of your working space and face east. Perform the Qabalistic Cross: touch the forehead (Ateh), the chest (Malkuth), the right shoulder (ve-Geburah), the left shoulder (ve-Gedulah), and clasp the hands at the chest (le-Olam, Amen). This aligns your personal energy with the vertical and horizontal axes of the cosmos.

Trace the invoking Earth pentagram. Move to the east quarter of the space. With your wand, dagger, or index finger extended, draw a large five-pointed star beginning at the topmost point and moving down and to the lower left, then up and to the right, across to the left, down to the lower right, and back up to the starting point. Stab the centre of the completed pentagram and vibrate the divine name YHVH (Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh) as you do so. Visualise the pentagram blazing with white or blue-white fire.

Continue through the quarters. Move clockwise to the south. Trace the same invoking Earth pentagram and vibrate ADNI (Adonai). Move to the west, trace and vibrate EHIH (Ehyeh). Move to the north, trace and vibrate AGLA. As you move between quarters, trace a connecting line at shoulder height to connect the pentagrams around the circle.

Call the archangels. Return to the east. Stand at the centre, face east with arms extended in a cross position, and say: “Before me Raphael. Behind me Gabriel. On my right hand Michael. On my left hand Uriel. For about me flames the pentagram, and in the column shines the six-rayed star.” Visualise each archangel as a vast and luminous presence at the appropriate quarter.

Close with the Qabalistic Cross. Repeat the Qabalistic Cross to seal the working.

In practice

The LIRP is used most commonly as the second half of a double working: LBRP to clear the space, then LIRP to charge it with elemental force for the operation ahead. This combination creates what Golden Dawn practitioners call a fully charged but balanced elemental environment, cleared of random influences and actively filled with directed elemental energy.

For daily practice, most practitioners use only the LBRP or use the Middle Pillar exercise between the banishing and invoking forms, reserving the LIRP for specific workings. The LIRP alone, without a preceding banishment, is rarely used, since the point is to fill a clean space rather than to overlay charges on existing ones.

Understanding the relationship between invoking and banishing, and developing the capacity to feel the difference in the ritual space between a cleared and a charged environment, is one of the foundational practical skills of ceremonial magick.

In myth and popular culture

The pentagram’s use as a symbol with directional valence, meaning that the orientation of the figure changes its magical effect, has roots in the Neoplatonism and Renaissance occultism that fed into the Golden Dawn’s formal system. Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531) illustrated the pentagram with the human figure inscribed within it, linking the five-pointed star to the microcosm of the human body and to the five elements. This image, later made famous by Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, established the pentagram as a symbol of harmonious human proportion as much as a magical glyph.

Eliphas Levi, the nineteenth-century French occultist whose work heavily influenced the founders of the Golden Dawn, developed the distinction between an upward-pointing pentagram associated with spirit and a downward-pointing one associated with matter, and he was the first widely read author to associate the inverted pentagram with adversarial forces. The Golden Dawn’s ritual system systematized Levi’s intuitions into the functional banishing and invoking forms that practitioners use today. Israel Regardie’s publication of the Golden Dawn’s complete ritual papers in The Golden Dawn (1937-1940) made these rituals available to a wide audience for the first time.

In popular culture, the pentagram has been the subject of extensive misrepresentation. Its use in horror films as a symbol of Satanism from the 1960s onward, coinciding with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966 and that organization’s adoption of the inverted pentagram with a goat’s head superimposed, led to decades of conflation between all pentagram use and Satanic association. Contemporary Wiccan and ceremonial practitioners frequently encounter this misunderstanding in public contexts.

Myths and facts

Several common misconceptions about the pentagram rituals and their use are worth addressing.

• The inverted pentagram is widely assumed to be an exclusively Satanic symbol. The inverted pentagram is used within Wicca’s second degree initiation, in Freemasonry’s Blazing Star, and in other contexts with no Satanic meaning; its adoption by the Church of Satan and some heavy metal aesthetics is a specific modern cultural association, not an inherent property of the symbol.
• The LIRP is sometimes described as dangerous because it calls forces into a space rather than clearing them. The elemental forces called by the LIRP are the foundational magical elements of the Western tradition: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air; they are not hostile intelligences, and their balanced invocation into a previously banished space is considered a safe and beneficial practice within the tradition.
• Some practitioners assume that performing the LBRP alone constitutes a complete daily practice. The LBRP is commonly used as a daily banishing; the full traditional approach also includes the Middle Pillar exercise and, for more complete elemental work, the LIRP; the banishing alone addresses only one half of the practitioner’s relationship with elemental forces.
• The Qabalistic Cross is sometimes treated as optional decoration for the pentagram rituals. It is structurally essential: it aligns the practitioner’s own energy with the cosmic vertical axis and grounds the working before and seals it after the pentagram tracings, functioning as the frame within which the ritual operates.
• The divine names vibrated in the pentagram rituals are sometimes described as Hebrew exclusively. While the four names YHVH, ADNI, EHIH, and AGLA are all of Hebrew origin, the names are used within a syncretic Western Hermetic framework that integrates Hebrew, Greek, and Egyptian elements; treating them as exclusively Jewish religious content misunderstands the tradition’s synthetic nature.