The Symbolism of the Glorious Star
The eight-pointed star is the special symbol of our tradition. Drawn as an endless interlace, it represents the eternally self-renewing spirit: it adorns the Banner of the New Life (above), displayed in every temple of the Astrum Sophiae. Drawn as two squares, it symbolises the interwoven unity of spirit and matter, force and form, breath and body. It is painted in alchemical colours of red and white on the Tessera, a consecrated token of aspiration which we place on our working altar. “As she is Form in all things, so he is in all things the Breath of Life. Hail entwined emblem of that unity, and symbol of the work!”
This form also conceals a mystical itinerary – a symbolic representation of the magician’s spiritual development. The development of this symbolic pattern is not a mere intellectual exercise, however pretty: through ritual work and meditative integration, the symbol calls to and awakens divine potencies latent within the magician.
To understand this symbol, we begin not with the eight-pointed star, but rather with two ancient symbols for earth and fire, and by analogy, matter and spirit: the triangle and the square. These symbols, on to which many extended meanings can be loaded, occur in many cultures. (The Pythagoreans, one of the tributary sources of the great river of western esotericism, used to proclaim that even numbers referred to the material world, and odd numbers to spirit.)
In the ordinary course of things, body and soul are in a very inexact and jumbled relationship. Sometimes this has been understood as the soul ‘trapped’ in matter, and many who have found themselves imprisoned by compulsion or material suffering find illumination in this viewpoint. Still, it is perhaps better to see this as simply the normal condition of human life: spiritual yearning mixed with all the conflicts, delights and agonies of the everyday. Dissatisfaction with this state, a desire for something more – a yearning sometimes difficult even to recognise in its earliest stage, save as restless dissatisfaction – often drives individuals towards the mysteries.
Through the practice of spiritual exercises, the aspirant’s soul is drawn upwards. In the inner life of the aspiring magician, body and soul start to form a new and different relationship. Symbolically, this is represented with the triangle of spirit now surmounting the square of matter. The single-pointed flame of aspiration is a commonplace among guides to magical development, or as a symbol of meditative absorption. (Crowley’s rite of self-initiation, Liber Pyramidos, takes its name from the three-dimensional form of the triangle, a name literally relating to flame.) In the Astrum Sophiae, this state is brought about through the initiation ceremonies combined with the individual work with the foundational practices, especially the Clavis Rei Primae.
There are several important facets of this symbolic stage. The figure is five-pointed, a number specially associated with discipline and purification in the Qabalah. Our foundational magical and meditative practices represent a freely entered form of discipline, undertaken for the purposes of self-transformation. This symbol was elaborated into a fivefold pattern in medieval and renaissance spiritual tradition. In the Astrum Sophiae, and other Ogdoadic orders, this symbol-pattern is called the ‘House of Sacrifice’, and it structures much of our ritual and inner life. Considered as a structure, its two pillars represent the Breath and the Body, and the triangular pediment the three spiritual principles of Justice, Mercy and Glory.
When the House of Sacrifice appears in art, it is often marked with a Tau, a symbol of election and ‘setting apart’. So a new initiate is anointed with the same sign. The symbols of limitation and marking off associated with the House of Sacrifice – the Tau is associated with Saturn, both as the guardian of the labyrinth of the 32nd path, and the inmost intuitive voice of the soul – have led to this stage being called the ‘ascetic ideal’. Yet asceticism is only one aspect of the symbol, and the life of the ascetic or contemplative is not the final goal of the magician.
Whether in symbolic, ritual form, or in high mystical experience – or both – the individual soul often undergoes a kind of death, in which it is separated from the body. This experience is sometimes terrifying, sometimes ecstatic, most often wrapped in both ecstasy and terror. Thus we are taught to ‘die before death’. In our diagram, we see the soul lifted out of the material world entirely: ‘striking the tent’, as one Hermetic text dealing with the regeneration put it. It is worth pointing out that the number of free angles in this symbolic representation is now seven, the classical ladder of planetary powers. Yet, importantly, this is not the desired end state for us, and great harm has been done by suggesting this experience is the culmination of our work.
The point is to integrate this experience into our embodied lives. Marsilio Ficino, the great Florentine magus and beloved figure in our tradition, wrote in one of his letters that the soul must at this point develop a double face, like the ancient god Janus, capable of looking up and down, or inward and outward, at the same time. He also describes the soul’s two faces as made of gold and silver. Mystical injunctions to ‘pray unceasingly’ might also be thought to refer to this state.
It is this soul, now returned to the body in freedom and equilibrium, which gives us the eight-pointed star, a true symbol of regeneration and the New Life. It is the octave, returned the same and yet different. ‘Into life renewed are the givers of life interwoven!’ It is this state which is symbolised by the token the magician places on his or her altar every day. Presented above as a bare schema, it is a rich and resonant symbolic pattern, and one which repays careful meditation and reflection.
