Ceremonial magick is the formal, learned end of Western esoteric practice, ritual conducted according to written instruction, with a documented textual tradition running from the medieval grimoires to the present.
An operation in the older manuals has a recognisable shape. The magician undertakes a period of purification, fasting, abstinence, prayer, sometimes for weeks. Tools are made and consecrated to specification: the wand, cup, dagger and disc or pentacle, corresponding to the four elements, plus the sword, the lamen worn at the breast, and the robe. Timing is set by planetary day and hour, since each operation belongs to a planet. A circle is drawn and inscribed with divine names, and the operator does not leave it. The spirit is called by its name and constrained by the names of God, and its sigil, a graphic seal, either transmitted in the text or generated from a magical square, is used to focus and to bind.
The theory underneath is the doctrine of correspondence: that everything in the cosmos belongs to a chain descending from a divine archetype, so that a plant, metal, stone, colour, perfume, hour, angel and letter all sharing a planetary nature can be used to reach that nature. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy of 1533 is the great compendium of these correspondences and the single most influential book in the tradition.
The distinction between theurgy and goetia runs through all of it. Theurgy aims at union with the divine and at knowledge of one's own higher genius; goetia commands lesser spirits to practical ends. Almost every writer in the tradition insists on the priority of the first, and a good deal of the surviving practical material is concerned with the second.