When people ask me about how to get started with Hermetic magick, I usually point them to Aleister Crowley’s Liber O. It gives the basics of building rituals and practicing Astral projection, including the famous Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.
The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, or LBRP, is a declaration and reorganization of one’s alchemical elemental energies, wherein one “banishes” the negative aspects of each of the Hermetic elements with their associated divine names facing the proper direction, as well as a minor invocation of the 4 elemental Archangels. The whole thing is started and closed with a preliminary ritual, the Kabbalistic Cross.
There are a lot of great resources out there already detailing the movements and and vibrations of the ritual, and many modern magicians use variant rituals, with different divine names or color correspondences. What’s really important is the act of doing the ritual regularly, often enough to be able to perform it from memory. This could be considered something of a spiritual hygiene practice, as undesirable elemental energies will keep reappearing, especially if you are doing things like shadow work or evocation/servitor work. The “open door” principle comes into play, that working these extraneous parts of the mind can have side effects of “bleed over” from the astral, or getting pestered by multidimensional entities. The symptoms can range from as docile as flickering shadows in the corner of the eye, to downright scary – phantom images in mirrors and voices calling from underground or in the walls. Most of these can be easily controlled if not not outright eliminated from a routine usage of LBRP or something similar.
Part of what makes the LBRP great is the utility it provides. It works great as a prelim to meditation or ritual work, as well as a centering and refocusing exercise in day to day life. Some people don’t even leave he house without doing the LBRP.
I would recommend getting the banishing form of the ritual down first, then try it using the invoking form, wherein one is drawing in positive elemental aspects, usually by reversing he direction the pentagram is traced in. This has an effect of charging up, or increasing one’s elemental energy. While this may seem like the better deal, it has been my experience the elemental banishing seems to be what’s needed more often, as we are all constantly generating little negative thoughts here and there that end up dragging us down under collected weight. Consistent cleanup of these little buggers will do you a world of good. I recommend doing it just before a ritual to clear out any lingering psychic residue, and to do the invoking form during certain astral forays or crucial moments of a ritual, to facilitate the desired element.
In time you may move on from here to more advanced hermetic banishings, like the Greater Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or the Lesser and Greater Banishing Rituals of the Hexagram, that incorporate more elaborate gestures and vibrations, or you may be more comfortable with something simple like the Rosy Cross Ritual or IAO banishing. Or, if you were so inclined, you just do something like clap your hands three times, or say some kind of phrase like, “So mote it be.” Whatever the hell that means. The point is to close the act of magick and reorient yourself back to “normal” mindspace, away from your desire so you don’t get lusty for it. In Liber Null it’s described how loud, fake laughter is a sufficient banishing practice, and I can attest to it working pretty well. It does make you appear to be a crazy bastard to anyone who might walk in on you, but that might well be the case regardless, depending on the magician. 🙂
The Burning Satyr 