Banishing vs. Invoking in Ritual

Banishing and invoking are the two opposing directional currents that structure virtually every formal ritual in the Western ceremonial tradition. Banishing disperses, clears, and closes; invoking attracts, calls, and opens. A practitioner who understands this distinction possesses the conceptual key to most ritual sequences, from a simple Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram through to complex evocatory work drawn from the grimoire tradition.

The two movements apply to more than just spirits and deities. They apply to elements, planetary forces, qualities of consciousness, and the energetic character of a working space itself. When a magician traces a banishing Earth pentagram, they are dispersing the heavy, fixed quality of Earth from the area; when they trace an invoking Earth pentagram, they draw that same quality in. The gesture is nearly identical; the starting point of the tracing changes everything.

Understanding when to banish and when to invoke is as important as knowing how. Most rituals begin with banishing, establish a consecrated field, then invoke the specific forces the work requires, and close again with a return to neutral. This arc has both practical and philosophical grounding: you clear the canvas before you paint, and you clean the canvas again when the work is done.

History and origins

The explicit codification of banishing and invoking as a paired system largely belongs to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which formalized the practice in the late nineteenth century through rituals such as the Lesser and Greater Rituals of the Pentagram and Hexagram. These rituals assign a distinct pentagram tracing for each element in each mode, giving practitioners a systematic vocabulary of thirty-two distinct elemental gestures.

The underlying logic, however, is older. Jewish mystical sources distinguish between drawing divine presence down and sending it away. Renaissance grimoires speak of summoning spirits and then properly dismissing them. Cleansing and consecration rites in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece all share the structural assumption that a ritual space must first be emptied before it can be filled with the desired influence. The Golden Dawn synthesized and systematized these older intuitions into a teachable, replicable grammar.

In the twentieth century, the system passed into Thelema through Aleister Crowley, into Wicca through Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente (who adapted the circle-casting structure), and into modern eclectic practice through countless subsequent teachers and writers. Today, banishing and invoking are recognized as foundational concepts across traditions that otherwise differ considerably in cosmology and style.

In practice

In formal ceremonial practice, the distinction between banishing and invoking manifests most clearly in pentagram and hexagram work. For the pentagrams, each element is assigned a particular angle of the five-pointed star as its starting point. Tracing the star from that angle toward the upper point performs an invoking movement; tracing from the upper point toward that angle performs a banishing. The planetary hexagrams operate on a similar principle, with specific tracing patterns distinguishing the invoking and banishing modes for each of the seven classical planets.

Beyond the tracing geometry, intention and attention are themselves directional. When a practitioner vibrates a divine name in an invoking context, they visualize the quality flooding inward and filling the space. When performing a banishing vibration, the visualization reverses: the unwanted energy disperses outward in all directions until the space is empty and bright.

The opening banishment

The most widely practiced banishing ritual in the modern Western tradition is the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Practiced alone at the start of a session, it clears the working space of ambient energetic clutter, focuses the practitioner’s mind, and establishes the ritual field as distinct from ordinary space. Even practitioners who do not otherwise work within the Golden Dawn system often use it as a daily hygiene practice.

A complete banishing sequence typically involves:

1. A centering practice, such as the Qabalistic Cross, to align the practitioner with the axis between heaven and earth.
2. Tracing banishing pentagrams at each of the four cardinal quarters while vibrating the associated divine names.
3. A summoning of the archangels (in the Golden Dawn system) or elemental guardians (in adapted systems) to seal and witness the cleared space.
4. A repetition of the centering practice to close.

This takes five to ten minutes for a practiced ritualist and far longer for beginners, who benefit from slowing down rather than rushing.

The invocation

Once a space is prepared, invoking draws a chosen force into it. An elemental invocation might call the qualities of Water, bringing receptivity, intuition, and flow into a healing or divination rite. A planetary invocation might call the influence of Jupiter to support abundance work, or the influence of the Moon for dreamwork and psychic opening.

Invocations often use a combination of vibrated names, visualized symbols, material correspondences (candles, incense, crystals), and spoken prayers or calls. The practitioner positions themselves as a vessel or a host, consciously opening to the quality being called while maintaining the clarity of purpose established in the opening banishment.

Deity invocation, in which the practitioner draws a divine presence fully into themselves, is sometimes called “assumption of godform” in ceremonial tradition. This is distinct from simple elemental invocation and requires greater experience and preparation.

Closing the work

Every invoking action requires a corresponding closing. After the work of the ritual is complete, the practitioner performs a closing banishment to disperse the invoked forces, return the space to neutral, and re-establish the boundary between ritual and ordinary consciousness. Skipping this step is a common beginner error with real consequences: practitioners may feel ungrounded, oversensitive, or unable to settle back into ordinary life after the session.

The closing banishment does not undo the work that was done. The magickal intention has been set and released. The closing simply tidies the energetic field and allows the practitioner to move on.

The balance of the two currents

Some practitioners develop a preference for one movement over the other. Those drawn to banishing tend toward protective, cleansing, and orderly practices; those drawn to invoking tend toward expansive, devotional, and spirit-relational work. A complete ritual practice requires both in appropriate measure. Over-reliance on banishing can produce a spiritually sterile environment and a practitioner who struggles to open; over-reliance on invoking without closure can leave someone chronically ungrounded and energetically porous.

The pair of movements also reflects a broader polarity in magickal thought: the ability to say no and the ability to say yes, the closed hand and the open hand, the circle that protects and the altar that welcomes. Learning to move fluidly between them is one of the central skills of the ceremonial path.

In myth and popular culture

The dual movement of inviting divine presence and then dismissing it is structurally ancient. In Homeric hymns and in Roman religious practice, formal prayers often concluded with a release: the deity was called, honored, and then allowed to depart. This structure appears in Vedic ritual as well, where the invocation of Agni opens a ceremony and a closing formula releases the divine presence at the end. The priest or ritualist understood that maintaining an invitation permanently was inappropriate; the divine is called for a purpose and then respectfully released.

The Golden Dawn’s formalization of banishing and invoking through the pentagram ritual system was described in detail by Israel Regardie in “The Golden Dawn” (1937) and has since been published in dozens of magical textbooks. Dion Fortune’s “The Mystical Qabalah” (1935) includes important discussion of how the two currents balance within the Western magical system, and her novel “The Sea Priestess” (1938) dramatizes invoking and banishing through ritual narrative.

In the broader popular imagination, the magician who calls something up and then loses control of it, failing to banish properly, is a pervasive narrative pattern, from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (most familiar through its Disney adaptation in Fantasia, 1940) to H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, in which the summoning of cosmic entities without adequate closing procedure is a recurring catastrophe.

Myths and facts

Common misunderstandings about the banishing and invoking distinction deserve direct attention.

• Many beginners assume that a closing banishment after a ritual “undoes” the magical intention that was set. This is incorrect. The magical work is sealed when the intention is released at the close of the working; the closing banishment tidies the energetic space and returns the practitioner to ordinary consciousness without reversing what was done.
• The idea that invoking and evoking are the same thing is a persistent confusion. Invocation brings a force or being into or through the practitioner; evocation calls a being into a space or vessel outside the practitioner. Both are distinct from simple banishing and invoking as elemental movements within a ritual structure.
• Some practitioners believe that the LBRP (Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram) banishes all energies from a space, including beneficial ones. The ritual is designed to clear stray, unwanted, and unbalanced influences; practitioners who perform it regularly describe it as creating a clean, neutral field rather than one stripped of all energetic quality.
• The assumption that banishing is always a closing movement and invoking is always an opening movement is approximately but not precisely correct. A banishing can be used at the opening of a working to clear unwanted material, and an invoking movement is used when drawing in a specific force, which may happen at any point in a working. The movements are not inherently sequential.
• Many newcomers to ceremonial practice treat the pentagram tracings as pure formality and assume their emotional state during the tracings does not matter. Experienced practitioners consistently describe the quality of attention and intention during the tracings as central to their effectiveness, not supplementary to it.