the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Albert Einstein

-o-

Something that I've found to be very effective and meaningful in my spiritual development is a ritual called the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP). I first learned it from Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magick and have performed it on and off for years now. Lately, I have come back to it, and I can really tell the difference on such things as dream recall, for instance. I see ritual as a moving meditation, and this simple yet effective performance is such a good example of that. The archetypal elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water come together and are purified in you. When I look to the east and visualize air, I use the memory of when I used to walk off of Skyline Drive near my home and sit on a cliff's edge to look off into the distance past the river and miles beyond. When I look to the south and visualize fire, I imagine a desert landscape with the sand beneath me and the hot sun baking into my flesh. When I look to the west and visualize water, I usually imagine a waterfall or a babbling brook from one of my nature hikes in the nearby hills. And finally when I look to the north and visualize earth, I think of ferns and trees growing up between the moss-covered stones as I take in the fresh scent of the black soil. The next step is building the Archangels, and that's always been a bit more difficult for me because, of course, I don't have anything from direct experience to base them on. Raphael is perhaps the easiest, but the rest are more difficult for some reason.

This is a celestial magick - one far removed from that which the average person might think that magick is all about, i.e. conjuring demons or casting a spell to bring yourself some money, etc. This part of the Great Work helps to clean you up and strengthen your aura - it's kind of like taking an Astral Shower, if you will. When I did this in the past for any length of time, people around me reported experiencing "little nasties" or little spirits hanging about. These can lead you to feel like you're being watched or cause you to think you're seeing movement - like a shadow - right on the periphery of your vision. It used to really irritate my fiance at one point, but we don't notice them that much any more. I recall one of my most triumphant moments many years ago when a good friend came to spend the night with me up in Fayetteville at my apartment. He slept down in the living room where I had been doing my ritual work, and the next day while we were having lunch, he mentioned to me that "something" had been bothering him for most of the night - a shadow which kept bouncing up next to him in and out of his vision and causing him to feel weird. This friend may be a bit superstitious but is not one to really be all that open-minded into things spiritual at all. "I did that!" I exclaimed, and even though it wasn't an intentional result, I knew it meant that I was really making some ripples on the Astral Plane.

This ritual is such a great one for setting apart a sacred space, both physically and mentally. I do it in combination with the Middle Pillar, which just energizes some of the central chakras, and a standard sitting meditation. It's helping me to scrape off the dross of my anxious thoughts and put into motion some thought forms which gather the good stuff to them. Slowly I am beginning to separate the story of me from the reality of who I really am...

For those of you who may be interested in this, here's a really great document I found long ago which describes the ritual and the theory behind it in nice simple terms:

The Essential Skills of Magick

If any of you have had experiences with this ritual, please let me know!

The Process of Unlearning

Essentially what we reach for in spiritual practice is a reversal of things that we commonly would strive for on the earthly plane – it is a letting go. Being as a little child in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven involves forgetting your differences and judgments. Arguably we are encased in flesh because we have identified so much with this life. We are all bits of God who have hidden themselves in the world of time and form, reveling in the tension of separateness to be able to feel the thrum of the dualities such as love and hate, power and weakness, pain and pleasure, and so on. After some time living on the Earth plane, we get lost and become so fixated on matter that we lose sense of where we really came from – Nothingness! To be born necessitates having to die someday because that is the way of form – like the alchemists say: solve et coagula. In the world, gathering knowledge is given great respect because it can pave the way to a great career and give you the ability to do things. However, part of the true purpose of the Path is the Forgetting – the Leaving Behind. At the same time, though, it can be said that in approaching the Spirit, you are learning how to forget. It’s kind of like trying to describe to someone what the sound of one hand clapping is…

Presence

I'm continually delighted by the fact that my job as a mental health paraprofessional so often dovetails with my own desire for personal growth. On Saturday I used a Books-A-Million gift card which I procured from my girlfriend's parents at Christmas to buy a couple of therapy books which have already proven to be very useful. One of these - The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook by Davis, Eshelman and McKay (sixth edition) - has a whole chapter on focusing, which in the book's therapeutic context is a kind of present awareness of where one's feelings are along with being able to articulate them. I guess it's pointing toward the classic therapy thing about getting in touch with your feelings and so forth. Anyway, Exercise 1 on page 119 is called "The Shy Animal at the Edge of the Woods". It's so simple yet so profound... Basically, it asks you to imagine that you are taking a walk on a beautiful day and happen to spot a wild animal looking back at you from a woodsy grove. You want to continue to watch the creature so you become as still as possible. The final question is "What are the qualities or attitudes you would embody so the animal won't get scared and run away?" I just love that analogy, because the inner landscape is exactly that delicate and tenuous. So often we lose touch with ourselves and pay no heed to the mind-body connection. This kind of redirection of focus hinted at in the above exercise allows one to get to a place where overwhelming emotions no longer override our judgment.

Of Thought and Judgment

I think about a lot of things all day long. My thoughts are a continuous stream of memories and reflections - an unceasing torrent of imaginative wanderings. I suppose by Decartes' rationale that this is a good thing because such experiences demonstrate that I am alive. However, the weight of these thoughts are as such that it is sometimes difficult to enjoy myself. One very obnoxious comic named Doug Stanhope did a segment called "Carnival Head" on one of his albums (No Refunds) in which he describes the times he's tried to go to sleep without the aid of alcohol or other drugs while lying in a motel room alone:

"I have a brain that just won't shut the fuck up... 1 AM, 2 AM... That's when the carnival inside my head starts... There's always music playing in there that sucks... 'We didn't start the fire!' Hmm... There must be something that rhymes with orange... Then, my ex-wife gets in there: 'You never took me to the Botanical Gardens!'"

I often can't sleep either, and for me such an observation hit the nail on the head with its intimation of such obsessive thoughts. Lately, I've been listening more to such mainstream New Agers like Eckhart Tolle, and even though I don't particularly like the increasing commercialism that seems to be becoming more evident in his organization's thought stream, I really like what he has to say. In his book The Power of Now, he says "The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you" (page 13). Like most of the other such observations in his book, that insight has been around for centuries, but he has found a really down-to-earth way to express it which people have really responded to. Thoughts become fueled by our emotional reactions to them and perpetuate themselves thus. It's almost as though they have a life of their own, and that, too, has been said many times before. Tolle goes on to say in one of his talks that "all thought is judgment," and I think that's a profound statement.

In the Tarot, the suit of Swords represents the power of thought. To do its job, a blade separates one thing from another by cutting. The mind by nature is inquisitive, and the whole process of making sense of something is based on the determination of how one thing is not like another. That's the bedrock of science - drawing the line between the rational and the irrational. But spend too much time trying to make things fit and put them into the right boxes and you have become irrational yourself and have lost sight of the elusive truth. The sword cuts both ways.

The realization of an empty space within is essential for spiritual growth. Lao-tse said it best: "We turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends." What do you think Jesus meant when he said "unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"? A child is pure because he or she does not have a lot of hard-wired preconceived ideas about things just yet. He or she hasn't really learned how to hate - that would involve some serious judgment. In order to hate, you have to have enough of a developed sense of self to say "How could they do this to me!" A child can become utterly fascinated by a bug crawling along some rocks because the mind that's observing the bug is not saying to itself "oh, it's just a bug," classifying it, and stowing it away with all the other boxed up memories in the Memory Closet. The child's mind is grooving to the experience of bugness.