Dowsing for Divinity

Between 2004 and 2006, I experimented with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP). I’ve often compared it to having one’s psyche scraped out with a rusty teaspoon—in other words, effective but somewhat abrupt.

This was well before any online discussion about whether using Kabbalah practices is cultural appropriation. I’ve already written extensively about cultural appropriation so I have only addressed one aspect of it in this post.

Thanks to Sorita d’Este for the writing prompt.

I learned how to do the LBRP at a workshop at the Wicca UK Conference in 2004 (Wicca UK was a wonderful online forum which renamed itself The Pagan Network; unfortunately it was hosted on a PHP bulletin board which got comprehensively hacked). I am not sure whether the person who led the workshop is still involved in the occult, so I won’t say his name because he seems to be a journalist these days. Suffice to say that he showed us how to do it elegantly and effectively.

I did the LBRP nearly every day for about six months. Some days I did it with the original archangels; other days, I did it with various Pagan deities.

At the time, as I’ve explained in my post Wobbling but not falling off (which is now part of my book, Changing Paths), I was very angry with Christianity and that anger was a protective coating for a lurking fear that Christianity might be true.

The LBRP was part of a process that led me to deal with that anger and fear (the other part of it was learning about liberal and progressive and inclusive churches).

The thing about the LBRP is that it is very powerful. It stirs up stuff in your psyche. That’s good of course, but it was also a very big deal and it all happened really fast. Hence my comment about it being like scraping out my psyche with a rusty teaspoon. Mostly beneficial, but also painful.

These days I can’t do any Hermetic stuff at all, as it makes me feel queasy. All my rituals are Wiccan rituals and not Hermetic (I realise there’s some overlap but not enough to trigger the queasy feeling). I attended an online workshop in 2020 which ended with some Hermetic exercises and I had to go outside and ground myself extensively. It is also why I do not teach others about Hermetic techniques.

So, my advice if you’re thinking of doing the LBRP on a regular basis: it’s very powerful so make sure you have supports in place if it stirs up stuff in your psyche. If you don’t have lurking stuff that you haven’t dealt with, you will probably be fine. If you do have lurking stuff that you haven’t dealt with and can’t afford therapy — well, at least the LBRP is free. There are now many online tutorials to show you how to do it.

I would assume that whatever the original ritual is in Kabbalah is something that practitioners prepare for with other, less powerful, practices — so perhaps my experience illustrates the risks involved with lifting practices out of their original context without doing whatever preparation and precautions were present in the original context.

I would be curious to hear about other people’s experiences with the LBRP. Did it benefit you?