Practice · Tools · Crowley, Book 4
Book 4 Pantacle
A flat wax disc of Earth and Malkuth, imagined as the practitioner's body, field of experience, and storehouse of everything that may be worked upon.
What the source describes
Book 4 completes its fourfold family with the Pantacle as Daughter and Malkuth. It is an image of the All in miniature: not only accepted facts but errors, habits, inherited conditions, and the whole material of a life must find a consciously judged place on it. The disc is therefore less a single inherited seal than a deliberately composed map of the practitioner's universe.
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 gathers and orders the material upon which the work acts. The dagger engraves distinctions on it; the operator studies tendencies, selects what helps the central purpose, and learns the limits of the conditions already present. On an altar it also serves the familiar material role of a disc or paten.
Form, materials and reconstruction
Crowley specifies pure wax and gives a strikingly concrete scale: about eight inches in diameter and half an inch thick. It is flat like the earth. The chapter allows the individual design to represent the whole field of knowledge and experience; the illustrated Sigillum Dei Aemeth is an example of a pantacle, not a universal pattern every reader must copy.
Element: No fixed element
Book 4 calls the Pantacle a symbol of Earth and makes it flat like the fertile plain. That relation belongs to Crowley's fourfold analysis and does not make every Solomonic pentacle an Earth implement.
Sources and variations
The spelling 'pantacle' is Crowley's. His wax disc is neither the Golden Dawn quartered Earth Pentacle nor the planetary figures of the Key of Solomon.
Primary account used here
Crowley, Book 4, Part II (1913), Part II, chapter IX, 'The Pantacle' ↗
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.