Banishing is the old form chaos magic kept
Chaos magic threw out most of the old ceremony. It kept banishing, because banishing does a job.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 by Westcott, Mathers and Woodman. I think little of its robes. Its system work was hard and real. It took scattered Western practice and ordered it into grades, with knowledge lectures to study and examinations to pass. The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram was given to members of its outer grades.
Israel Regardie published the order's papers in four volumes between 1937 and 1940. Aleister Crowley was a Golden Dawn member before he founded the A.'.A.'. in 1907. Liber Null calls the Illuminates of Thanateros "the magical heirs to the Zos Kia Cultus and the A.'.A.'." The book draws its own family tree, and the Golden Dawn is on it.
What Carroll kept, and what he cut
Liber Null says that before you move on to sigils or dreaming, "it is essential to develop an effective Banishing Ritual." Then it lists what a good one does:
- It prepares you for concentration faster than the trance exercises alone.
- It helps you resist obsession when dreams go wrong or a sigil surfaces in your conscious mind.
- It protects you, he writes, from hostile occult influences.
The first two I can check. Banish before a sigil and log how fast your focus arrives. Log whether the working stops looping in your head afterward. Both show up in a diary.
The third is a claim about the world that I cannot verify. I do not state it as fact. If you banish for that reason, log what happens and judge it yourself.
The form is where Carroll earns the credit. He gives four minimum elements and no script:
- Describe a barrier around yourself with your magical weapon, and visualize it strongly.
- Focus the will on a visualized image. His examples include the weapon itself, or a ball of light inside your head.
- Reinforce the barrier with power symbols. The pentagram works, he says, or the eight-pointed star of Chaos, "or any other form." Words of power are allowed.
- Make "a brief but determined effort to stop thinking."
The old ritual traced pentagrams at the four quarters and vibrated divine names. Carroll kept the frame and let you choose the parts. That respects the builders and drops the costume in one move.
A clean boot and a clean shutdown
A banishing marks where a working starts. More to the point, it marks where the working ends. Every technique I trust has an exit, and a banishing is the exit you can see.
It also trains a switch. Stand up, run the same two minutes, and your body learns the change from ordinary time to working time. That is conditioning. It works because it is boring.
Build a small one
Pick a gesture, a short phrase and a symbol you can draw in the air. Run them the same way every time for a month. Keep the stop-thinking step to a few seconds. If you feel dizzy, sit down.
Log what changed. Credit the Golden Dawn for building the form, and Carroll for stripping it to the frame.
Then close the working the way I close mine. Say thank you, and walk away.