The House of Khabs
On the House of Khabs within Golden Dawn and Thelemic symbolism.
The Rosicrucian tradition tells of the seven-walled vault where Christian Rosenkreutz was buried — white ceiling, black floor, an altar over his coffin, inscribed as a compendium of universal unity — which the Golden Dawn's inner order built as a physical room for its 5=6 Adeptus Minor initiations. Sam's problem with it is structural as much as symbolic: it is a tomb, a hall of the dead, ill-suited to the current aeon, and as a fixed room with seven eight-by-five-foot walls it is also unwieldy and impossible to transport. What follows is his record of an alternative he calls the House of Khabs, built and used for adept-level initiation and magick.
His method is to substitute birth symbolism for death and to ephemeralize the structure, borrowing Buckminster Fuller's term for doing more with less — Fuller's own example being the pocket calculator's shrink from radio-sized to credit-card-sized. Because the transformation is mythic, Sam supplies an addendum to the Rosicrucian legend: the adepti, opening the Pastos ninety years after their first discovery of the vault, find it empty of Rosenkreutz's body, only his tools and regalia remaining; sealing the door with the sign of N.O.X., they hear the vault collapse behind them, and consulting the ROTA learn that the Founder has passed on to be born again, and that the portal will not reopen for two hundred and ten years, until the keys of the New Aeon are found.
The physical structure has three nested parts, all derived from the geometry Plato sets out in the Timaeus and Fuller reworks in Synergetics. Outermost is a tetrahedron, the minimum possible form in space, built from three lashed poles and ground ropes, its basal vertices carrying the three Hebrew mother letters — the overarching body of Nuit. Within that sits the Isometric Vector Equilibrium Matrix, the shape produced by the closest packing of equal spheres (as when seven eggs settle into a hexagon around a centre, extended above and below into a shape Fuller called the closest thing to a shape for God), its twelve vertices carrying the zodiacal letters and its rings the colours black, white, red and green — attributed to Ra-Hoor-Khuit as mediator between Nuit and Hadit. Innermost is a cube formed from two interlocking tetrahedra, the Palace of Four Gates named in Liber AL, its twelve edges carrying the zodiac's double letters and the thirteenth given to Earth — this is Hadit's shape, the revisioned Pastos. At the centre stands a cubical altar topped by a forty-nine-petalled rose on a gold cross, its faces carrying the Minutum Mundum and the zodiacal, planetary and elemental colour scales, rimmed white above and black below to form what Sam calls the Rainbow about the Throne; above it hangs a stellar rendering of the Rose Cross in full Golden Dawn colouring.
Sam gives practical build instructions — tripod poles some twenty-five feet high, a flexible hexagon of rubber-hosed joints, ropes staggered up and down to form the interlocking triangles — because the whole point of the design is that it can actually be assembled and struck rather than built once and left standing. He closes by naming what the completed structure represents: a full-dimensional model of what Tibetan Buddhists call the dharmadhatu, or in Thelemic terms the Law of Space, and — reading the fourfold outer tetrahedron, the unified IVEM, and the eightfold inner cube together — an embodiment of House 418, the numeral of the Great Work itself.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →