The Headless Ritual
Accessing Full Body Consciousness
The Headless Ritual is a 15-minute long visual formulation that you perform in your mind and that I have just written a short book about. It’s derived from the Greek Magical Papyri, written around 2,000 years ago, and is known in that language as Akephalos Daimon (lit - headless spirit).
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were fans. But not to the degree that English occultist Aleister Crowley was. Crowley was massively into it. Though he knew the ritual by another name - The Bornless Ritual - likely due to the Greek name being misrepresented at the time.
Crowley devised an 11-month self-retreat structure based around the ritual. It required the participant to perform the ritual as follows:
Let the Adept perform this Ritual aright, perfect in every part thereof, once daily for one moon, then twice, at dawn and dusk, for two moons, next thrice, noon added, for three moons. Afterwards, midnight, making up his course, for four moons four times every day. Then let the eleventh Moon be consecrated wholly to this Work; let him be instant in continual ardor, dismissing all but his sheer needs to eat and sleep.
Liber Samekh - Aleister Crowley
Crowley performed the ritual several times daily whilst travelling across China in 1906 but it seems that he himself did not do it for eleven months in the manner specified above.
He based the self-retreat on that originating in another early esoteric document, The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. There the aspirant had to spend eighteen months engaged in dedicatory practices to increasing degrees, though not utilising the Bornless Ritual.
The intention of both retreats was to achieve the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA). This he envisioned as a celestial being who’s task it was to guide and support the aspirant on the spiritual path.
Connecting to the HGA was seen as being of paramount importance. It was the first of two big tasks that the aspirant needed to complete, the other being the passage across Da’ath, where all knowledge of the world needed to be dropped such that the ego could be reborn. You couldn’t do the second until you had completed the first, else you risked losing your mind.
Okay, so that’s how Crowley and the occultists who followed him used the Bornless Ritual as the central element of a self-retreat.
But… is the Holy Guardian Angel really what this ritual is about? I would like to challenge that popular concept.
I think the ritual is actually about what it says it’s about in the original Greek. It’s about connecting with the “headless” part of ourselves; the instinctual self that guided us before we became thinking beings. Whilst our frontal lobes are the main organs that distinguish us from our primate forbears, they are by no means the only way by which we can navigate our world. In fact, much of our behaviour does not rely on thinking to the degree that we typically imagine it does.
And a big issue with being such a thinking people is that we have become abstracted from the sense of our body and hopelessly dependent on thinking. Addicted to thinking, one might say. In my own work with this ritual, I have found that it seems to expand the sense of the body, and arguably connect it to the astral body, especially when you perform it as a part of 6-month self-retreat, accompanied by specific Bioenergetics and Breathwork practices.
Becoming “headless” does mean that we need to give up thinking altogether. That would be extreme. It simply means that we develop a much deeper sense of our body, feeling especially our belly, lower back and heart centre and thus achieving far greater resilience, intuition and a sense of deep groundedness.
If you’re interest is piqued, feel free to check out my book, The Headless Ritual: Accessing Full Body Consciousness on Amazon US here or Amazon UK here. It’s priced £4.99 for Kindle. You can also purchase the DRM-free version (ePub and PDF) from my website here.
More reading:
The Headless Ritual - Devaraj Sandberg
The Headless One - Jake Stratton Kent
Liber Samekh - Aleister Crowley