INSECTO DARDO BRUJO

Banishing is the least dramatic ritual in the Western tradition and one of the few that most practitioners keep doing after everything else has fallen away. It is short, it is boring, and it is the thing that makes a practice survivable. The version most people learn is the Lesser Banishing of Ritual, which has been the default since the nineteenth century, and the confusion starts when people treat it as a combat move rather than a declaration. It is not a fight. It is a boundary stated in language that any hostile intelligence would be expected to understand, followed by an exit. This page sets out the sequence, why the structure is the way it is, and the three things that are frequently confused with it and frequently needed instead.

What the ritual is actually for

Read the Lesser Banishing closely and it does one thing: it declares a limit. The traditional text names four quarters, the four archangels standing at them, and the elements assigned to each. Around that skeleton there are two different movements, one to the east and one to the west, and the words are an instruction to anything present to leave.

The important part is that it is addressed rather than aimed. There is no target, no name, no intention aimed at a person. That is not politeness; it is the mechanism. A declaration has a boundary in it, and a directed attack does not.

Why it has survived since the nineteenth century

The Lesser Banishing comes out of the Golden Dawn's initiatory material and has been the default for about a hundred and fifty years, which is a very long time for a short piece of text to be used that often. The reason is structural. It needs no tools, it takes about two minutes, and it can be done anywhere, which means it survives being moved, being improvised, and being taught badly. A ritual that can be done in a queue is a ritual that will actually be done when it is needed, which is the only property that has kept it in continuous use.

It also does not escalate. Nothing in it can be carried further than intended, which makes it unusually safe to hand to a beginner. Most ritual material in this field gets stronger as you go, and this is one of the few that does not. It is also the version people are least embarrassed to be seen doing, and the social cost of a ritual is a real cost that this one happens to avoid.

Step one, decide what you are closing

Before any words, decide whether this is the end of a working, a change of state, or a clean-up of a specific space. The three use the same words and they are not interchangeable in practice, because the mental set you bring to them is doing as much work as the recitation.

If you cannot say which one you are doing, do not start. Banishing used as a general anxiety discharge rarely helps and reliably trains you to treat the ritual as a mood rather than a boundary, which is the opposite of what it is for.

Step two, the two movements

Draw a line in the air before you, from your left shoulder to your right, then draw a second line crossing it. Go to the centre, turn east, extend your arms and trace the east quarter. Return to the centre, turn west, trace the west quarter. Some versions add north and south, which is a nineteenth-century expansion rather than an essential part.

What matters is the physicality. A banishing performed entirely in the head is a visualisation, which is a different activity with a different record. The arm movement, the turn, the return to centre, the walking out of the space: these are the parts that make it a boundary rather than a sentence.

1. Stand at the centre, feet apart, and fix your attention.
2. Trace the line before you, left shoulder to right.
3. Turn east, arms out, and speak the quarter aloud.
4. Return to centre, turn west, and repeat for the second quarter.
5. Walk backwards out of the space, or turn and leave deliberately.

Step three, the words, and how to say them

Out loud. The power of the traditional banishing is partly that it is a formula you are repeating rather than improvising, and partly that it is audible to yourself, which is hard to fake. A silent banishing is a meditation with extra steps.

Use the version you can remember accurately rather than the most elaborate one. The Golden Dawn text is long and beautiful and impossible to recite exactly, and a slightly abridged version said cleanly is worth more than the full text read badly from a phone.

Step four, the exit, and why it is the part people drop

Finish by leaving. Not standing still afterwards, not sitting down, not checking whether it worked. Move out of the space deliberately, and ideally backwards, because the exit is what closes the boundary rather than merely declaring it.

This is the most commonly omitted step and it is easy to see why, because nothing happens. But a ritual that declares a boundary and then leaves you standing in the room has declared nothing, and the physical exit is what the declaration was about all along.

The three things people confuse with it

A banishing clears the space. A cleansing purifies what is in it. Grounding puts your own footing back under you. These are different operations, they are not interchangeable, and the order in which you need them is not fixed by any authority you will find quoted.

A cluttered room wants cleansing. A bad afternoon wants grounding. An argument you just had, or a session that went somewhere uncomfortable, wants banishing. Most people need all three more often than they think, and they reach for banishing because it is the one with the most familiar words.

• Banishing: something is unwelcome and you are declaring it out.
• Cleansing: the space or the state is muddled rather than hostile.
• Grounding: you are the one who is unmoored, not the room.

When it is worth doing and when it is not

After a working, before a working, and at the end of a difficult session, it is worth doing. During an anxiety episode, it usually is not, because the ritual involves holding a formal intention while the part of you generating the anxiety would rather you did something else.

There is also a failure mode worth naming, which is using the banishing to avoid the thing that was actually difficult. If a session keeps ending badly and you keep banishing afterwards, the banishing has become a way of not looking at what the session produced.

A short version you can learn in a week

Learn the four quarter names and the four archangels. Learn the two movements. Learn the exit. That is a complete banishing and it will take a week of repetition, and you can then use it for the next several years without thinking about it again.

This is the pattern most of the practical material in this field follows and it is worth noticing. A small number of elements, learned accurately, used repeatedly, beats a large repertoire used once. The repertoire feels like progress and it is mostly inventory.

What the four quarters are doing

Each quarter is given a name, a natural element and a direction, and the correspondence between them is old rather than arbitrary. East is air and the element that moves before anything else does, west is fire and the element that consumes. The archangels assigned to them are the ones whose traditional jurisdictions match those qualities.

The two quarters that the abbreviated version keeps, east and west, are the two that carry the movement. A version with four is more symmetrical and considerably more pleasant to perform, and the difference is about that rather than about effect. Both are legitimate and the choice is aesthetic once you have understood the structure.

A first week, with something to recite

Learn the four quarter names on day one and the archangels on day three. Do the two movements on day two until they are automatic. On day five, say the whole thing out loud in a room, badly, and keep going to the end rather than stopping to correct yourself.

The point of the week is that the words become boring. A banishing you have to think about is a performance and a performance has to be believed in. A banishing you can say while making tea is a piece of procedure, and procedure is what makes it reliable.

• Day one: the four quarter names.
• Day two: the two movements, until they stop needing thought.
• Day three: the archangels and the elements.
• Day five: the whole thing aloud, in one room, without stopping.

What the popular accounts get wrong

The most common account describes banishing as a fight, which requires an imagined opponent and therefore supplies one. The second most common describes it as a burst of power, which requires a belief about what power does and supplies that instead.

Both accounts produce the same observable behaviour, which is why they persist: both involve arm movements, both involve words, and both are followed by a felt sense of something having been settled. The difference is invisible from the outside, which is why it is worth being deliberate about, and why the structural version holds up better even when the claim behind it is not.

Where banishing fits in a wider practice

In a practice that has more than one part to it, banishing belongs at the transitions: the end of a working, the start of a different kind of session, and the point at which you have finished with a space for a different purpose.

It is not a substitute for any of the other three operations, and using it as one is the single most common reason people find it does not work for them. A cluttered room does not need a declaration of boundary, it needs a clean. A bad hour does not need an exit, it needs a floor. Reaching for the version you remember rather than the one you need is the mistake, and it is a mistake of vocabulary rather than of intention.

Boredom is the point, not a problem with it

The reaction most beginners have is that it feels like nothing, and that reaction is correct. A two-minute declaration with no emotional content is doing the same job a two-minute declaration with strong emotional content is doing, and it is doing it without the cost.

Practices that are enjoyable tend to become practices that are performed when we feel like it, and practices that are boring become practices that are performed whether we feel like it or not. The second is what produces a practice that still exists in ten years. Nobody keeps a banishing because it felt good and everybody who has one kept it because it took two minutes.

Recording it, and what a record is for

One line: date, what you closed, and whether you left the space. The third field is the one that earns its keep, because the exit is the part that actually completes the boundary and the part that gets quietly dropped once a ritual is familiar enough to be done from memory.

If you want to know whether it is doing anything, the record is the only way. My own experience over a year of doing it properly was that the sessions I closed cleanly were the ones I remembered later as finished, and the ones I skipped the exit on were not. That is a weak result and it is the one I have.

What to leave out, and for how long

Leave out the elaborate apparatus, the oils, the sigils, the tools with names. Leave out the invocations of other entities, which turns a boundary into a negotiation. Leave out anything that requires you to be angry, because anger is a state that will be hard to get out of afterwards and a boundary declared while angry is a boundary you may want to withdraw.

Leave all of it out for the first year. The default position should be that you are doing the smallest version accurately, and that you are adding to it only when you can say what the addition is for. That is the whole reason this material is worth learning and most of the reason it is worth learning early.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often is it sensible to perform a banishing?

After a working, before a working, and at the end of a difficult session. The useful cadence is a few times a week, not daily as a general anxiety discharge. Using it as a routine mood-regulator is the most common way it stops working, because a boundary is a specific declaration rather than a general feeling.

Does a banishing need the complete Golden Dawn text?

No. Aversion of an abridged version said cleanly is worth more than the full text recited badly from a screen. What the ritual actually needs is that you know it well enough to say it without reading, so the words do the work rather than the reading. Pick the version you can hold in your head and learn that one.

Is banishing the same thing as a protection ward?

No, and they are used at different moments. A ward is set and left, and is maintained. A banishing is a declaration followed by an exit, and is complete when you walk out. Putting up a ward every time you are anxious produces a house full of unresolved declarations, which is a common and entirely self-inflicted problem.

Does any of this work if I am not sure it does?

The interesting and defensible claim is narrower than the one usually made. Done regularly, a banishing reliably marks a transition, and transitions are useful. Whether it expels anything external is a separate question, and the honest answer is that the ritual is worth doing for the boundary it draws rather than for what it is claimed to remove.

Is there any point buying something for banishing?

Not for the ritual itself, which is free and needs nothing. A purchase makes sense only if you want the same app that does the sequence for you, which some people find useful for consistency, and the useful thing to check is whether it also handles the cleansing and grounding variants rather than only the one most famous text. The method does not require it.