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I don't think it's actually indicative of the ceremonial tradition. While it is common to test an entity's legitimacy while astrally journeying (for example, by asking it for its name, its characteristics, etc. and trying to match them to the classical correspondences), I've never heard of whipping a pentacle at a spirit after a successful invocation.
I probably phrased that badly. I've never come across the idea of "banishing something once it has been invoked to see if it is a true deity" in ceremonial magic either myself. What I was getting at is that the ceremonial tradition tends to be the default operating system that people draw from when trying to contact and establish relationships with deities. And this mechanism - largely developed by Victorian-era magicians and based on earlier sources like the goetia and various other grimoires - is perhaps not the ideal model for interacting with every form of spirit, invisible intelligence or deity.
I don't have any problems with ceremonial magic operating within its own parameters, but when you get the tools of ceremonial magic taken out of their original context and posited as the one true and safe way of interacting with all Gods and Spirits, then I think you start to run into problems. You get situations where people take a bit of ceremonial - such as the LBRP - and then apply it to places where it's neither necessary or particularly helpful, as per the example we are talking about. If you were to pick up any random contemporary book on magic, you would likely get the impression that the LBRP is some crucial, universal, all important thing that you have to include in what you are doing or else you are in for trouble - but we are talking about a ritual that is less than 200 years old.
So perhaps more accurately put, what I was getting at is that the above example is indicative of the kind hegemony that ceremonial magic exerts on contemporary western magic. We end up with a situation where people are drawing on techniques originally derived from medieval grimoires for conjuring demons - and then unquestioningly applying these methods to interaction with anything from Classical divinities, to Hindu Gods to African Powers to Norse deities - without really questioning where this operating system and these ideas have come from or giving any thought to their legitimacy in a given situation.
You end up with a backwards and unsophisticated approach to this work because its like using the instruction manual from a PC as your guide to understanding a Mac (or a washing machine, or a toaster), and valuing the truth of the words printed in this handbook over your own intuitive, personal experiences of what you are interacting with. You can't really get magic out of a cookbook, but I think a lot of modern magic tries to, especially when it comes to spirit and deity work. This cookbook might be useful if you are trying to work specifically within the closed parameters of Goetia, or Golden Dawn magic, or Crowley's magick, or whatever. But if you are taking isolated bits of the ceremonial method out of their original context and then applying them to other things as if they are universal principles, you end up with skewed perspectives like that of Monk's friend being posited as absolutes.
Mr Crowley on the LBRP: “Those who regard this ritual as a mere device to invoke or banish spirits are unworthy to possess it.” |
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