Practice · Tools · Crowley, Book 4
Altar
Book 4's double-cube centre: the fixed basis of the work, the law under which it proceeds, and the container of every temple implement except the lamp.
What the source describes
Crowley treats the altar as both furniture and argument. Its double cube presents ten square faces, read from Kether above to Malkuth below, while its four-square stability represents the extension of will into law. The operator is expected to devise a coherent system of geometry for it, so the altar embodies knowledge of natural law rather than merely serving as a table.
Historical setting
Book 4 gives a twentieth-century symbolic interpretation of ceremonial equipment. It often reads an object as a faculty of the practitioner, a different project from the practical instrument chapters of the Key of Solomon.
Common uses
It establishes the physical and symbolic centre of the temple and carries the wand, cup, sword, pantacle, oil, and related instruments. The lamp alone is exempt: it hangs above and is said not to be subject to the law represented by the altar. Its working height is individualized to the operator's navel.
Form, materials and reconstruction
Book 4 reports oak as one authority's choice for rigidity and acacia as another's for resurrection. The top is gold or gold-covered and engraved with a figure such as the Holy Oblation, New Jerusalem, or Vitruvian microcosm. Elemental tablets and king-sigils may appear on the sides, though Crowley calls these special rather than general. The proportions—the height of a double cube set to the operator's navel—are more stable than any one decorative program.
Element: No fixed element
This source does not assign this particular instrument a fixed element. Its materials or effects should not be turned into an elemental correspondence without a named source.
Sources and variations
Altars occur across religions and grimoires, but this double-cube, ten-surface, navel-height reading is Book 4's. It should not be retrofitted onto every Solomonic or Golden Dawn altar.
Primary account used here
Crowley, Book 4, Part II (1913), Part II, introduction and chapter III ↗
Further references
- Book 4, Part II: searchable transcription ↗The full Part II text, including the separate chapters on each implement.
- Book 4, Part II: 1913 first edition ↗Bibliographic record and original page scan, useful for checking pagination and plates.