I wrote this post about Gordon White’s take on the Headless One Rite, which he connects with Gobekli Tepe and with the constellation of Orion.  Gordon published a book, The Chaos Protocols, in 2016, which quoted Jake Stratton-Kent’s translation of the Headless One Rite, and provided additional context. It offered up a number of ideas that this was one of those particularly special rituals

What is the Headless One Rite?

The Headless One Rite is a combination prayer-exorcism ritual from the Greek Magical Papyri, by the way, and calls down the power of the Headless One into the reciter in order to empower them to cast out demons and attain power over spiritual realms.  And what are the Greek Magical Papyri? They appear to be a collection of spells and rituals belonging to a Greek wizard or sorcerer (maybe called a goes?) in the city of Thebes (modern Luxor) in Egypt from around the 1st Century BC.  They began to appear in the art and antiquities market in Egypt in the 1820s AD. They wound up in the British Museum, the Louvre and the Bibliotheque Nationale in France, several German museums, and Sweden.  Since they were in Greek, it was possible to translate the rites fairly rapidly: critical editions in Greek, Latin and other languages were published between 1843 and 2012, most notably in English the so-called Betz edition after their collator and editor.

Why I’m revisiting this

On a drive a few days ago (I originally wrote this on Election Day in the US on 8 November 2016), I had an additional insight.  According to Gordon’s take on things, some parts of Gobekli Tepe are connected to Orion and the Constellation of Scorpio.

But Gobekli Tepe was built around 11,000 years ago.  And we know that there’s this thing called Precession of the Equinoxes. Precession of the Equinoxes means that the Earth is moving in space, along with the rest of our solar system.  The result is that the position of the fixed stars change slightly over time, changing their positions by about 1° every 72 years.

So what happens when you take 11,000 years, and identify how many degrees of change there are between the present, and when Gobekli Tepe was abandoned?  We’re looking at a change of around 154°, or not quite half the sky. Swing backwards to about 13,000 years, to when we think Gobekli Tepe was built, and the change is almost exactly 180°. Today, in the 21st century, Western astrology assumes that 0° Aries always occurs on the Spring Equinox, but 13,000 years ago, the constellation of Aries would have been rising 5 and a tenth months-ish earlier.

But this means that Aries would have been rising behind the Sun, not in March but in November. The Ram would have been a foretelling or prophecy of winter.  And the Gemini-Taurus-Orion conjunction of the Sun which I now associate with the month before Summer Solstice would have occurred in…

Constellation on A Mission

… December?  Orion with the head of the Sun associated with the Winter Solstice and the coming of Winter? And Moon-headed Orion in the spring, closely associated with the Summer Solstice?

It adds another layer of excitement, really. Maybe part of the reason that The Headless Rite is enjoying such a renaissance these these days is that his season has come around at last, slouching toward Belly Hill, to be born.

Gordon has spoken in his podcast about a variety of forces being “on a mission” — St. Cyprian on a mission, Ayahuasca on a mission, and so on.  And it seems to me that Orion, too, is on a mission. There is, perhaps, a reason this prayer/ritual/rite has come back into focus after such a long period of time.

For now…

For now, I note that beginning on 3 December 2017, with the full moon in Gemini, the Moon will appear to be on the shoulders of Orion. It’s as good a time as any to begin your Decans Walk around the year, or to begin working with the Mansions of the Moon, or to take up Gordon and Jake’s version of the Headless One Rite. You have time to prepare, time to lay plans, time to organize your thoughts and make your commitments.

From the Decans point of view, the Sun will be in the second Decan of Sagittarius, as the Moon is in the first Decan of Gemini. The Moon will be in the fifth Mansion, imagined as a crowned head. and the “execution” will be the Moon rolling into its appearance as the new moon in Capricorn as the Sun crosses into Capricorn, roughly at the Winter Solstice.

Liked it? Take a second to support Andrew on Patreon!