The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, usually abbreviated LBRP, is a short ceremonial form associated with the Golden Dawn. Its purpose within the system is to establish an orderly ritual space: the practitioner marks the four directions, pronounces sacred names and places themselves imaginatively at the centre of a harmonised set of elemental correspondences.
What happens during the ritual?
The commonly published form opens with the Qabalistic Cross. The practitioner then faces east and traces an earth-banishing pentagram, connecting its centre with the divine name YHVH. The same type of pentagram is traced in the south, west and north, with Adonai, Eheieh and AGLA respectively; an imagined circle joins the quarters. An invocation names Raphael before the practitioner, Gabriel behind, Michael to the right and Uriel or Auriel to the left. The Qabalistic Cross closes the work. The order, wording and gesture details have varied among printed versions and successor traditions.
What is being banished?
In Golden Dawn terminology banishing is not simply an attempt to chase away malevolent beings. It is a formal clearing and balancing of the ritual field. The original pentagram instructions recommend performing a lesser banishing before other magical operations. This is why it appears as a preliminary in so many later manuals. The five-pointed star serves as a sign through which the four elements are considered under a unifying principle of spirit.
Is the LBRP a complete initiation?
No. It is a repeatable ceremonial exercise, not a substitute for a grade ceremony. The Golden Dawn also distinguished the lesser pentagram work from more specialised elemental pentagrams, hexagram rituals and Inner Order operations. A person seeking to understand the LBRP benefits from knowing its place in the sequence rather than treating it as an isolated charm.
What is worth paying attention to?
The coherence of the circle matters more than theatrical performance. Know which direction you are facing, which name belongs there, how the star is traced, and why the ritual returns to its beginning. The invocation of the archangels is a way of completing a fourfold structure: east and air, south and fire, west and water, north and earth. The ritual makes most sense when those associations are understood rather than merely recited.
The divine names and quarter correspondences at a glance
The traditional clockwise circuit is east—YHVH—Raphael—air; south—Adonai—Michael—fire; west—Eheieh—Gabriel—water; and north—AGLA—Uriel—earth. The divine names are associated with the pentagrams, while the archangels are invoked from the central position afterwards. Although both sets refer to the same quadrants, they occupy different moments in the performance. The body of the rite is therefore better remembered as a repeated sequence of position, star and divine name, followed by a separate invocation of the presences surrounding the centre. The Hebrew names also have histories outside the Golden Dawn. YHVH is the four-letter divine name, represented in the ritual by a conventional letter-by-letter pronunciation; Adonai means "Lord"; Eheieh relates to the verb "to be" and the biblical divine self-designation; AGLA is an acronym. Understanding this prevents an easy mistake in which a learner assumes they are simply four names of angels or a series of magical nonsense syllables.