The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

22 January 2026

No single ceremony is more widely practiced in modern Western occultism than the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and few five-minute rituals anywhere carry so much history per minute. Composed within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and taught to its Neophytes from the late 1880s, it reached the public through Aleister Crowley's "Liber O" in The Equinox (1909) and, definitively, through Israel Regardie's publication of the order's papers between 1937 and 1940. Regardie's estimate has become proverbial: a year of the LBRP, performed daily, is worth more than any other magical training available.

Structure: the three movements

The Qabalistic Cross. The operator touches forehead, breast, right shoulder, left shoulder, intoning Ateh, Malkuth, ve-Geburah, ve-Gedulah, le-Olam, Amen: "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever." The words adapt the doxology of the Lord's Prayer into Hebrew, and the gesture maps the Tree of Life onto the body: crown above, kingdom below, severity and mercy at the shoulders. The operator is made, for ritual purposes, the axis of the world.

The pentagrams. Facing east, the operator traces in the air a banishing pentagram of earth, beginning at the lower left point and sweeping up, and charges it with the divine name YHVH, the Tetragrammaton. Turning by the south, west, and north, the sequence continues: Adonai ("Lord"), Eheieh ("I am," the name given at the burning bush), and AGLA, a notariqon compressing the Hebrew sentence "Thou art mighty forever, O Lord." The four names are drawn from Jewish liturgy and medieval Christian Cabala; the circle of flame the operator visualizes connecting the four stars is the old grimoire circle, drawn now in imagination rather than chalk.

The archangels. Arms extended in a cross, the operator calls the four archangels to the quarters: "Before me Raphael, behind me Gabriel, on my right hand Michael, on my left hand Uriel. For about me flames the pentagram, and in the column stands the six-rayed star." The stationing of angels at the compass points descends from Jewish angelology through the medieval Sefer Raziel tradition and the bedtime prayer that places the same four angels around the sleeper. The Cross is then repeated, sealing the rite in the symmetry it opened with.

Reading the rite

Read historically, the LBRP is a compact anthology of the Western tradition: Jewish prayer formulas, angelic quarters, Renaissance pentagram lore out of Agrippa, arranged by Victorian magicians into a daily office that a busy clerk could perform in a hired room. That is not a criticism. The arrangement is brilliant, and its portability, no tools, no altar, no chalk, is precisely what let it become the tradition's universal practice.

Read practically, the rite does what banishing generally does, clears the space, settles the operator, asserts a sovereign center, and adds the pedagogical functions the Golden Dawn intended: it drills visualization, vibration of names, directional awareness, and the basic grammar of pentagram work that the order's higher rituals assume. Regardie's psychological reading, the rite as a daily structuring of the psyche around its own center, and the traditional apotropaic reading coexist without friction; the practitioner genuinely need not choose, a point developed in Models of Magic.

Learning it

The teaching consensus: learn the words until they are automatic, then the lines, then the visualizations, and only then attempt all three at once. Vibrate the names, slowly, resonantly, rather than reciting them. Perform it daily for a season, ninety days is the traditional trial, before forming any opinion of it. The beginners' complaint that nothing is happening and the adepts' report that everything runs through this one rite are, the elders insist, descriptions of the same ritual at different depths of practice. On this the entire ceremonial lineage, which agrees on very little, agrees.