Stop banishing. You are not that interesting.

Vect0r wrote a calm, careful post about why chaos magic kept banishing. It's a good post. I disagree with almost everything you're about to do with it.

Here's what I watch happen when a beginner picks up banishing. They haven't done anything yet. No sigil, no godform, no working of any kind. And they're already drawing a barrier around the apartment, just in case.

In case of WHAT?

The spirits aren't lining up outside your apartment

Picture it. Somewhere out there a hungry intelligence has surveyed every flat in your building and picked yours. It's been crouched at the window for weeks, waiting for you to finish your first sigil so it can slip in and rearrange your sock drawer.

You are not that interesting. I say it with love. Nobody is. If there's a being that can climb into your head through a glyph you drew on the back of a receipt, it's had the whole of human history to find a better target than a person with a notebook and a candle stub.

I've done workings that were loud and stupid and enormous. I've shouted names at furniture. I've never once opened the door afterward and found the neighborhood queuing up to get in. What I found was my own head, doing what heads do after you spook them: replaying the working at 3 a.m., jumping at the fridge, certain something was off.

Adrenaline did that. A tired brain with an excellent imagination did that. Nothing came through the window.

The book says protection. I say that's where the fear came in.

Vect0r was honest about this part, so I will be too. The book Vect0r quotes, Liber Null, calls an effective banishing ritual essential before you move on to sigils and dreaming. It gives three reasons. Banishing gets you into focus faster. It helps you shake a working that keeps looping in your head. And it protects you, the book says, from hostile occult influences.

The first two you can test in a diary. Vect0r said so, and Vect0r was right.

The third one is the line beginners actually hear. Nobody memorizes "faster concentration." They memorize the hostile influences, and from then on every creak in the hallway has a job title.

That one line has sold more fear than any grimoire ever printed.

Banishing as an anxiety ritual

Watch what the ritual does for a nervous person. A flicker of dread shows up. You run the ritual. The dread fades. Your brain files the lesson: the ritual stopped the bad thing.

So now it needs the ritual to feel safe. Next time you run it before the working, and again after. Then before bed, because you did a working this week. Then on a Tuesday, because the dread happened to show up on a Tuesday.

Call it what it is, a compulsion with candles. The ritual never gets a chance to fail, because you never skip it, so you never find out whether it was doing a damn thing. A guard you can't test is a decoration, and a decoration you're afraid to take down is a leash.

Fear is a lousy teacher in this craft. People who start from fear stay small. They collect protections the way other people collect deadbolts, one more, one more, and the actual working never grows bigger than the safety rig bolted around it. I've met beginners whose banishing ran longer than anything they had to banish afterward.

What I'll hand Vect0r

Banishing does one job well, and I'll give it up without a fight. It marks a start and a stop. A boring, repeatable gesture at each end tells your body that ordinary time is over and working time has begun, and later that working time is done. That's conditioning, and conditioning works.

So use it as a switch. A switch is small. It takes a minute. It has a lid on it.

What I'd do instead

Do the working first. Skip the fortress. Then pay attention to what actually happens in your body and your week, and write it down.

If you get through a working with a clear head and a good appetite, you've just collected evidence that you didn't need the barrier for that working. Keep that evidence. It's worth more than any fear you inherited from a book.

If a working leaves you rattled, handle the rattle like a person. Eat something, drink water, go outside, call somebody, sleep. Then ask whether the working was too big for where you are right now, and make the next one smaller. Banish if it helps you land. Just be straight with yourself that you're using it to settle your nerves, and treat it that way.

Then run the experiment. Do your next three workings with a one-minute switch at each end and no fortress. Do the three after that with the full show. Log focus, sleep and mood. If the full show wins on the log, keep it, and you've earned it. If it doesn't, you just got twenty minutes a day back for the rest of your life.

One plain limit, said flat. If a ritual starts to feel like something you can't stop doing, if skipping it brings on panic, or if you aren't sleeping, take that to a doctor or a therapist. Magick doesn't treat anxiety, and getting real help is no insult to your practice.

Vect0r says log it and judge it yourself. Fine. I took the deal, and my log says the barrier was optional. Bring yours to the Pit and tell me I'm wrong: https://pit.chaosmagick.com/