Hekas, Hekas, Este Bebeloi: On Banishing

12 January 2026

The formula in our title, hekas, hekas, este bebēloi ("afar, afar, ye profane") is a herald's cry from the Greek mystery religions. Before the secret rites could begin, someone stood up and ordered away everyone who had no business being present: the uninitiated, the impure, the merely curious. Virgil gives the Latin twin of the cry to his Sibyl at the mouth of the underworld: procul, o procul este, profani, "away, be far away, you profane", spoken, tellingly, at a threshold, in the last moment before a dangerous crossing. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Victorian magical society from which most modern Western ritual magic descends, adopted the Greek formula to open its ceremonies, and it compresses the whole idea of banishing into five words: before the work begins, the space and the operator are cleared of what does not belong.

That is really all "banishing" means. A banishing ritual is a formal procedure for clearing a working area — and the person about to work in it — of unwanted influence, however one understands that influence: intrusive spirits, stray thoughts, the accumulated static of an ordinary day. It is performed before serious ritual work, performed again afterward, and in most systems practiced daily on its own, the way a musician runs scales. Every practical tradition this site discusses performs some version of the gesture, and the unanimity is itself the interesting historical fact.

An old reflex

Rites of purification and expulsion are about as close to universal as anything in the history of religion, and the ancient Mediterranean is the clearest case. A Greek washed his hands before pouring wine to the gods. When Odysseus finishes slaughtering the suitors in his own hall, the first thing he calls for is fire and sulfur, and he fumigates the house from end to end, a spiritual disinfection performed at the scene of mass death in one of the oldest texts we have. Before the Athenian assembly could lawfully meet, officials purified the meeting ground with the blood of a piglet carried around its perimeter. Walter Burkert's standard survey of Greek religion devotes a full chapter to katharmos, purification, and the point of the chapter is simple: one did not approach the gods carrying whatever one had picked up in daily life. Cleansing was the precondition of contact.

The magicians inherited the reflex and sharpened it, because their contact was riskier. The Greek Magical Papyri (which are practical spell-manuals from Greco-Roman Egypt written between roughly the second century BCE and the fifth century CE) open their operations with protective formulas and phylacteries. The word means "guard-amulet": divine names written on a strip of papyrus or a small metal sheet and tied to the body, worn against the very powers being summoned, the way an electrician wears insulated gloves against the current he fully intends to handle.

The medieval material makes the same move in Christian dress. Necromancy (the conjuring of demons and the dead) was largely the work of clerics in minor orders, men trained in Latin and liturgy, and they borrowed the Church's own exorcistic language wholesale. The fifteenth-century necromancer's handbook edited by Richard Kieckhefer as Forbidden Rites is saturated with conjurations "by the power of the Cross," aimed at keeping intrusive spirits at bay while the intended one is dealt with. And then there is the circle: a ring drawn on the floor in chalk or scribed with a sword, its rim crowded with the names of God, the operator standing inside and everything else, by definition, out. A circle is a banishment made continuous for the length of the rite, like a banishing frozen into geometry.

What the moderns systematized

What the nineteenth-century revival added was not the idea but the system. The Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, compressed purification, protection, and the assertion of the operator's sovereignty into a five-minute daily office requiring no equipment at all: the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, treated in detail in its own article. It is worth sketching here, because the sketch is the argument. The practitioner faces east and performs the Qabalistic Cross, touching forehead, breast, and both shoulders while intoning Hebrew words that amount to "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory" — a gesture that treats the body itself as the temple about to be consecrated. He then makes a circuit of the four compass points, tracing a five-pointed star in the air at each and "vibrating" a Hebrew name of God into it; vibration is the technical term for a slow, resonant intonation, felt in the chest as much as heard. Four archangels are named as wardens of the quarters (Raphael before, Gabriel behind, Michael and Uriel to either hand) and the Cross is repeated to close. That is the entire rite. What a medieval operator distributed across baths, fasts, vestments, and a nine-foot chalk circle, the modern one performs in gesture and breath before breakfast.

The economy proved durable. Crowley produced variants of his own, such as the Star Ruby. Israel Regardie, who published the order's papers and worked in later life as a psychotherapist, reread the whole procedure in psychological terms. And the Wiccan traditions built the casting of the circle at a rite's opening, and its releasing at the close, on the same skeleton.

Why banish at all

The traditional rationale is apotropaic; the word simply means "designed to turn harm away", and it is perfectly plain: the work attracts attention, and not all attention is welcome. The spirit catalogues themselves assume as much. The most famous of them, the Goetia of the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon, lists seventy-two spirits with instructions for summoning each, and closes every operation with a "license to depart": a formal, courteous dismissal, after which the operator waits until the visitor is entirely gone before stepping out of the circle. The license is banishing's twin: the one clears the room before the audience, the other after it, and the manuals are stern about omitting neither.

The psychological rationale, dominant since the mid-twentieth century, reads the same acts as state management. Ritual work is done in an unusual state of consciousness, deliberately induced; the opening banishing draws a hard line between ordinary mind and ritual mind on the way in, and the closing one draws the line again on the way out, so that the practitioner returns fully to the shared world instead of wandering through the afternoon half-entranced. Regardie liked the rite well enough to prescribe the LBRP to non-magicians as a nerve tonic: a daily exercise in composure that happens to have archangels in it.

The chaos current (the irreverent British school of the late 1970s that kept magic's techniques while cheerfully shredding its metaphysics) kept this practice too, which tells you something. Peter Carroll lists banishing among the first disciplines of the aspiring magician on plain engineering grounds: people who open doors should know how to close them. On this view banishing is not theology but hygiene, and one needs no opinion about spirits to see the sense of leaving a workspace as one found it.

Nothing prevents the practitioner from holding all three rationales at once; they prescribe identical behavior. Banish before working, banish after working, and banish on the days one does neither, for practice. The seatbelt comparison has become a cliché of the teaching literature because it is exact: unnecessary until it is very necessary, and therefore always worn. Whatever model of magic one favours... and the models disagree about nearly everything else; the tradition speaks here with one voice, which in this literature happens rarely enough to be worth noticing.