The Magician's Foundation

The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, commonly abbreviated LBRP, is the foundational ritual of Western ceremonial magic as taught by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the traditions descended from it. It is the first ritual an initiate learns and the one practised most often, used to cleanse a space of unwanted influences, to still and centre the practitioner, and to establish a protected ground before further magical or meditative work. Its logic is one of purification and orientation: before anything is invoked, the field is cleared and the operator aligned.

The ritual has a fixed structure. It opens and closes with the Qabalistic Cross, in which the practitioner traces upon their own body the points of a cross while intoning Hebrew words of power drawn from the closing of the Lord's Prayer, identifying the self with the axis of the divine. Between these, the practitioner turns to each of the four cardinal directions, traces a banishing pentagram in the air, and vibrates one of the Hebrew names of God associated with that quarter, sealing the circle so drawn.