THE GATE THAT OPENS ONLY IN ECSTASY

The Star Sapphire as Erotic Sacrament and the Passage Across the Abyss

In my first book – which was aimed at absolute beginners to magick and Thelema, something I always have to reiterate for the bad-faith “Thelemites” commenting on it – I only briefly touched on Aleister Crowley’s mysterious ritual Liber XXXVI: The Star Sapphire. At that time, I made it clear that this ritual is not for novices. It is aimed at the Adept, which, in A∴A∴ parlance, is someone who has already attained such grade by achieving Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which, in Thelema, is tantamount to discovering their True Will.

I noted there that the Star Sapphire’s true purpose might be hinted at in an elusive book titled Ararita: Elaborations on the Star Sapphire (published under the pseudonym “A Traveller in Darkness”), which explicitly shows each “station” of the ritual as a sex magick act.

In this analysis, I want to build on those hints and fully explore what Liber XXXVI is really about. Spoiler alert: It’s about the sacred alchemy of sex – the ecstatic union of opposites – intended to propel an Adept across the threshold of the Abyss and into mystical unity.

To think otherwise, in my opinion, is either disingenuous or flat-out foolish, and unfortunately, some recent commentators on this topic fall squarely into that latter category. As is often the case in Thelemic circles, there seems to be a willful obfuscation of the true sexual nature of such rituals – perhaps an attempt to protect the “trade secrets” of a rather moribund O.T.O., since the Star Sapphire is essentially a public description of the Order’s guarded IX° sex-magick formula.

As Tau Merlin, a good friend of mine and a member of IX° Degree (now retired from O.T.O.), remarked:

“Come on Marco. The Star Sapphire just happens to be included in Liber Agape, the most central IX° Degree text, surrounded with sex magickal references before, in the middle, and after. It is a coincidence, a pure coincidence I say!! It is all symbolic, and nothing to do with sex or magick, or anything. Right! After all, any sexual references in the IX° Degree are coincidences, and let's not even go into the culinary delights of spermatophagy.”

For the curious, Liber Agape vel Azoth belongs to that thin shelf of O.T.O. papers long treated as esoteric, though today they are secret more by convention than by obscurity. I will take up that text in a future article, showing point by point how its instructions dovetail with the Star Sapphire and how Crowley salted his published work with secrets hiding in plain view for anyone with eyes to see.

In this essay, instead, we’ll peel back those obfuscations and examine the Star Sapphire in detail: its intended audience and context, its overt symbolism (the Magick Rood and Mystic Rose, the Holy Hexagram, etc.), and its deeper purpose of annihilating dualities in the Night of Pan. We’ll see how Crowley, true to form, hid open secrets in plain sight – the union of the phallus and the yoni – beneath a veneer of ritual and Latin jargon. We’ll also address the counterarguments by some who insist Liber XXXVI wasn’t “meant” as a sexual ritual, such as a commentary dating back to 2006 by renowned Thelemic expert James Eshelman that was recently recirculated. Ultimately, I invite you to consider the evidence and make your own decision. For my part, I’ll show you why I’m convinced the Star Sapphire is a ritual of sex magick at its core, one designed to induce a state of divine unity by the “rapture of Union that destroys” the sense of separateness.

Let’s begin by looking at who this ritual was written for and why that matters.

A Ritual for Adepts (and Beyond)

One of the first clues to the Star Sapphire’s significance is its official classification and intended grade. Crowley first published Liber XXXVI as Chapter 36 in The Book of Lies (1913). On the title page of The Book of Lies, he plainly stated that it was an A∴A∴ publication in Class C and D, official for the Grade of Babe of the Abyss. This is crucial context. Babe of the Abyss is the A∴A∴ Grade of an aspirant who stands on the threshold of the Abyss – having completed the Adeptus Minor through Adeptus Exemptus grades, and preparing to cross into the supernal realm of the Master of the Temple.

In other words, the Star Sapphire is aimed at those who have already become Adepts and are now trying to undergo the profound transformation of crossing the Abyss. It’s not a simple banishing ritual for beginners; it’s literally for those about to be annihilated and reborn on the other side.

Understanding what crossing the Abyss means in Thelema sheds much light on this ritual’s true intent. The Abyss represents the chasm between the individual ego (the realm of the lower Sephiroth on the Tree of Life) and the enlightened consciousness of the Supernal Triad.

To cross the Abyss is to surrender the ego entirely, to let all dualities and personal identities be obliterated in the infinite Night of Pan, whereby Pan means “All” and also “None,” the all-devouring All (as well as a nod to the sensual god of Nature and Madness of the Greeks). Above the Abyss, everything that appeared separate is realised to be One. Crowley often described this process as the annihilation of opposites.

For example, he noted in The Book of Thoth that “below the Abyss, contradiction is division; but above the Abyss, contradiction is Unity. And there could be nothing true except by virtue of the contradiction that is contained in itself.”

In other words, the ultimate truth is a unity that encompasses all contradictions. The Book of Lies, which contains the Star Sapphire, is itself a kind of training in this mode of thinking: it deliberately piles “contradiction upon contradiction” until the mind flips from division to unity. Crowley frames the whole book as “the text-book for a Babe of the Abyss”, forcing the reader to experience the collapse of logical dualities. Those who attain the grades above the Abyss “live in the Night of Pan” and can only be reached by “the annihilation of the All.” This is the level of consciousness the Star Sapphire is targeting: the mystical death of the ego in an explosion of unity.

Given that framing, it’s no surprise that Liber XXXVI is suffused with the language of the union of opposites. Crowley labelled it “the real and perfect Ritual of the Hexagram,” indicating that it accomplishes what the traditional Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram only hints at. In occult symbolism, the hexagram represents the union of two triangles, often interpreted as the union of the divine masculine and feminine, Shiva and Shakti, or in Thelemic terms, the union of the Beast and Babalon. The Star Sapphire is “real and perfect” because it doesn’t just trace a geometric hexagram in the air; it enacts the union that the hexagram symbolises. Crowley placed this ritual in Class D (which denotes official rituals and instructions), and indeed he was somewhat coy about it, writing in his commentary that “it would be improper to comment further upon an official ritual of the A∴A∴.” He clearly wanted initiates to study it in the original and tease out its meaning, rather than spelling everything out for the casual reader. But Crowley, being Crowley, he also left a trail of hints both within the ritual text and in related writings, which – once you have the keys – make the interpretation unmistakable.

To sum up the context, the Star Sapphire is an advanced ritual for those who’ve achieved adept-hood and are undergoing a momentous spiritual transition. It appears in a book designed to dissolve logical categories in the mind of the aspirant. It is explicitly concerned with the undoing of separateness (“duality reduced to unity” under N.O.X.). All this strongly suggests that its purpose is nothing less than engineered ego-annihilation.

And as we’ll see in the rest of the essay, the method it employs to induce that annihilation is a form of sacred sexuality, that is, the sacramental use of the sexual act to generate a state of divine consciousness.