This part is a disclaimer, which you can just skip over if you like. I warn you that there will be a few references to God throughout my writing about the LBRP and other pentagram rituals and I hope to explore what is the nature of God to the magician doing this ritual. My perspective is that some Ceremonial magic is done from a very Christian point of view. Some magic was never meant to be done like that at all, but the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and other pentagram rituals are definitely part of a Mystical Christian tradition. Much of magic draws from pre-Christian, Pythagorean and Neoplatonic concepts of God. Since these ideas had a huge effect on Christian philosophy, these Greek philosophers provide us with a good direction to lean, if you want to avoid the Christian perspective, but don’t rush to swap out names or chunks of the ritual. Here is why and partly how to swap them if you need to.

So many magical practitioners are not happy working within a Christian paradigm, because for many years Christian and Judaic priests forbade any magical practice. They still forbid it today. Often people like me, who grew up in a Christian church, find it hard to separate their church experience from the names which appear in so much Qabalah. Many Neopagans feel repressed because their own religion is not as well recognised as Christianity and Judaism. Neopaganism often ends up eclipsed by them. Then they embark on magical learning from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, only to come across the very names which have repressed them. If you do not want to learn the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn then don’t. If you really have something against it, you’re not meant to learn. It is not your Will right now and it might not be for you. It’s not the only way to do magic, but it is one of the few orders to have a substantial mystic depth to it. At this point, too many people try to replace Christian angels and god-names with pagan ones to make themselves more comfortable, but then they lose the point of the ritual and they do not achieve the mystical growth it was intended to bestow.

Mystical work is not always comfortable. Imagine if, in our diet, we did everything that was comfortable. We would eat sugary treats and high carbs, all the time. Presented with the option of bitter leaves or marshmallows, what would you pick? Remembering that so many of us are children spiritually, what would a child pick? Almost definitely the marshmallows! Well, with a human being’s current diet, the bitter leaves promote far much more health containing many necessary minerals. The marshmallows have nearly zero nutritional value other than calories. They will increase our blood sugar, contribute to insulin resistance, and trigger triglyceride increasing our potential for heart disease. They might have pork fat in them which can contribute to cholesterol and that’s without mentioning the cavities they might form in our teeth. So you can see by analogy how doing what you feel is not always the best for you in life, then why do we assume it would be as such in our spiritual life? When we take initiations into spiritual organisations our intention is mystical assent, but this is not a natural state of being. Human beings are not naturally so evolved. So why do we like to assume such magical rituals should feel good and natural? The spiritual process is often uncomfortable with many growing pains, so we cannot just do what feels right and natural, not when it comes to magical rituals designed for some form of mystical ascent. Sorry for those that feel they have a right to immediately change all rituals before they do them and before they understand them, but they’re wholly unworthy to possess them. Magic is hiding itself from them in plain sight.

Even the Neoplatonic views are somewhat monotheistic, but often have a place for pagan deities too. In these views, when “God” is mentioned, they indicate a definition that encompasses everything that exists in the universe. The Neoplatonic “God” includes fate, all possible thoughts, archetypes, deities and all that is beyond human experience; all rolled into one, the Monad. “God” here includes what we call the “metadivine realm” (don’t worry I’ll try my best to explain what this is). Pagan deities are forces of nature, or at least the earlier ones were. If nature is your “divine”, then your “metadivine” is beyond-nature. In the pagan worldview, the forces of nature were still subject to fate, which is considered to be beyond nature or “metadivine“. The pagan gods had to obey the forces that pre-existed the universe in the same way humans might obey gravity.

In the creation of Judaism, what made the religion unique was that they stopped worshipping nature and started worshipping fate. Their “God” was not subject to fate; it was fate. This God, which is the God of the LBRP, is an emanation of the creative force of “God” that pre-existed the universe. Dr. Christine Hyatt of Yale university talks about the change in religion from Paganism to Judaism in Ancient Israel and Judea. She notes that what people are calling god are two very different things. For the pagans of the time their gods were the forces of nature itself. When magic was practised in these pagan cultures, ritual magic involved the forces of the “metadivine” realm, which went above and beyond the forces of nature. It was the forces of fate. It was beyond the gods. The metadivine realm was mentioned most clearly in creation myths, filled with vague ideas such as a world that mostly consisted of water and the abyss (Enuma Elish) or Chaos, Earth and the Abyss (Hesiod). There are representations of the metadivine forces.

So if we were to do this ritual from the perspective of pre-Judaic pagans then our deities involved must be the metadivine and not the divine. These are often deities with no birth story because they pre-exist nature and the flow of time, but occasionally there are stories of the birth of Metadivine entities. They exist before all born gods. They are entities such as Apsu, Tiamat, Chaos, Gaia, Eros, Tartarus, Ra, Ra’s daughters Maat and Isfet, Apep/Apophis, Aten, Atum, the Bornless spirit, Odin (or Bestla and Borr), Shiva, Shakti, the Dao, the Rainbow serpent in the milky way and many more.

The Neoplatonic Monad is all the gods AND the metadivine. When Judaism took over it staked the claim that their “God” transcended nature. They took the metadivine realms and claimed them as their “God”. Whereas the pagans of the same region took nature as their deity. In Neoplatonic views, there is a space for a god that transcends nature and the world of forms which early Neoplatonists often equated with the realm of the pagan gods. So for pagans who don’t want to do a ritual with Christian God forms you can just imagine they are Neoplatonic gods, but be careful if swapping out words or archetypes.

To truly meet with the divine you should do it without expectations, so you can truly experience what you are meeting with, rather than meeting a preconceived being in your head. Many people have this preconceived idea about “God”. They imagine that God is going to appear as Jesus, a great old bossy-boots father figure that looks remarkably like Zeus or something else with no corporeal form. If you go in with these expectations then you might see that. Alternatively, if you go in openly, you will have your own experience of the deity in a way that truly reflects the force you met with. Personally, I perceive god as the spiritual substance that binds the entire universe together and transcends beyond it and that fits with what I experience when I practice Magic. Don’t call me Yoda, but it does sound like the force. Maybe I experience it that way because I have my own Daoist leanings. No matter how I see the big G, it’s up to you to figure out what you believe in, not by theorizing alone, but also by direct experience and experimentation. Not by your preconceived notions born by your experiences in earthly mundane reality, but by spiritual experiences. Not by impressions architected by people who have no spiritual awareness or understanding, but seem to run churches anyway. You might even find out Jehovah seems to be more like an alien from the star Sirius than the Christian representation of God. You’ll never know unless you try.

I ask people to please, please, please don’t just substitute the Judaic names for God with pagan names before you have a lot of experience doing the ritual and understanding the context of the ritual. Like if you have been doing it every day for 6 months then by all means play with it, but otherwise, get to grips with it first. Truly try to get the experience of the ritual before you change it. Working magic is like a recipe for a cake. If you say “I don’t like the taste of eggs” and decide to substitute eggs for peeled potato because they’re a similar shape and colour then your cake isn’t going to come out right. Until you really know what the cake is meant to be like, don’t change it. When you know what it is meant to be like then you can make changes. At that time you can recognise what you left out and whether the change was beneficial to your purposes. I believe that the god names in the LBRP are there because they relate to secret formulae in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which intend to unite the Nephesh and the Ruakh, then unite the Ruakh and the Neshamah and finally have all 3 working in unison to act as the Yechidah. So if you swap out names for something more your flavour you’re likely to totally miss the point and from a pagan perspective, you do not know what divine names are capable of stuff like that.

Enough of the god chat and back to the pentagram ritual!