If you pick up nearly any book on the practice of magic, you’ll find several examples of Circle Castings — those rituals magicians use before casting larger spells or performing ceremonies. Often these are not explained in terms of necessity, variation, or the function they serve in the greater ritual as a whole. For this reason, many magicians dismiss the idea entirely as being too “complicated” or “a waste of time”, but nothing could be farther from the truth. If you have the desire to cast a spell right, and the time to perform the ritual at all, you have time to cast a Circle. It’ll pay off.

Some people think of circles as “protection” (as in “why summon evil forces and protect yourself from them unless you’re some kind of pussy?!”), and I can assure you in no uncertain terms that a circle will not protect you from a determined attacker. Wards will not protect you from a determined attacker. Talismans will not protect you from a determined attacker. Even those ubiquitous astral mirrors you hear the new-agers clucking over will not protect you from a determined attacker. Circles are not for protection. Circles are for containment.

What do they contain?

You.

A ritual is essentially the setting in motion of certain forces. Nobody knows or should care what these forces are or specifically why they operate — the laws that govern them are well known, and this is enough. The purpose of using “Opening Rituals” like the Opening by Watchtower, Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, Greater Pentagram, Supreme Pentagram, Greater and Supreme Hexagram, Star Ruby, Star Sapphire, etc ad nauseam, is to set “lab conditions” within the space where you are doing your working. This usually only needs to be about six or eight feet for a single magician at work, slightly larger if he has seated assistants acting as batteries.

Now you have your space. First you want everything to be Just Right, so if you don’t have a dedicated Temple space then the same room is going to be cluttered with various other random thoughts and astral attachments from whatever activities go on in there. What do we do about that? Picture your Temple space like a cooking pan. It should be clean before you cook, unless you’re cooking the same thing the next day (bachelor cuisine thinking). Now, the elements you’re working with are as vague or detailed as you want, but they will all come in one of three settings: Ambient (natural), Dampened (by banishing) or Heightened (by invoking). You want everything to be Just Right for your ritual, so you want compatible elements to be set on Heightened and opposing elements to be set on Dampened. Everything else can be Ambient because it shouldn’t affect your work.

Intermission: This is not as complex as it sounds. This only requires the same amount of forethought as planning a road trip – having your mix tape, sunglasses, water bottle and map. People typically put more thought into a first date than is required preparation for a ritual.

So let’s say you’re doing a working of Wrath (I go there in my examples, because I’ve done a lot of Wrath in my day). Let’s be trite and say we’re invoking Mars. And not just Mars, but specifically Bartzabel, the planetary Spirit of Mars. So how should be open the Temple? What sets the conditions just right for a working of Wrath? Well, we could invoke Mars directly with a planetary Hexagram ritual. That’s easy enough. But let’s go back a step and see if we can even make the Mars invocation more potent. Invoke Fire. That could even be helped further by banishing Water first.

So you banish Water, invoke Fire, and invoke Mars. You have set opposing elements to a dampened state, and heightened elements aligned with your work (which you still haven’t actually started yet….). The Temple at this point may become very warm, and you may be delighting in fantasies of kicking someone’s ass in. Music helps. How else could we make this ritual more powerful before we actually perform the evocation of Bartzabel?

Liber Resh is a ritual designed to align the magician with the sun by performing a specific invocation at the four stations of the sun, but this ritual is easily adapted to any of the planets. Simply find out where Mars is in relation to the Sun (space.com has a wonderful astronomical simulator called Starry Night Backyard which is perfect for this), and switch the timing of the invocations to correspond to when Mars is rising, aloft, setting, and occulted. Do this for, say, five days (Mars’ number) and by the day of your invocation you should be just blazing with Mars energy for your work (which you still haven’t actually started yet….). Now, Liber Resh is a ritual specific to the OTO but anyone with a little creativity could easily modify the essential concept to their own work. Take out all the Egyptian mumbo-jumbo and it lends itself readily to any other system.

See how these rituals work? They’re there to enhance certain energies and dampen other ones, to make you a more suitable vessel for the work you’re setting in motion. A lot of people dismiss ceremonial magic out of hand because of all the frittering around it requires, but once you’ve done one really good working you know where all that extra effort is paying off.

The symbolic actions entailed in any given Opening Ritual, whether banishing or invoking, all serve to create very real changes within the person performing them, very much akin to warming up and stretching before a big workout. Opening Rituals “limber up” the magical muscles you’re about to use, and get you primed for action. Banishing isn’t any more “necessary” than showering, and invocation isn’t any more “necessary” than putting on clean clothes, but doing both keeps you clean and healthy and fit for the world in which you seek to act. NOT doing at least some form of preparatory work leaves you at the mercy of your environment, which is a distinct disadvantage in most cases. It only makes sense to chase the bad stuff off and put the good stuff on.

So, once you have all the proper switches turned on or off, go ahead and perform your ritual. It may be as much as ten times more powerful as it would be if you hadn’t taken the time to properly open your Temple. The Opening by Watchtower is nice, but I’d recommend writing your own version of it once you’ve become proficient with the ritual itself. Remember, the point isn’t what ritual you use, it’s what results you achieve. And you only get out of it what you put into it.