I made the first post last night on the seven hermetic principles

I dont think I can agree. There are things other then spirits that people need to banish. Like the thoughtforms they create and just as we all bathe we need to know how to cleanse ourselves and our space.

I’ll bump the post.

The Hermetic principals are fine, but why that first and why not focusing meditations and exercises? The reason I ask this is, at least from my perspective, is that while hermeticism is a fine paradigm and mode it doesn't build much in the way of core skills.

Much like in martial arts, there are paradigms, models, and then good hard training. Paradigms have their place, as do modes of operation, but good hard training is useful across most if not all paradigms and models.

Many times a beginner doesn't need to know "the theory of the universe according to X" where X is the author of a specific mentality. Instead what the beginner needs are ways to improve their strength and the methods taught in a way that utilizes that strength.

One of the greatest weaknesses of many banishing rituals is it doesn't explain, nor make use of, the personal power within the individual. It relies only on external forces, without building connections to those forces.

Take the Lesser Banishing Pentagram Ritual. In the hands of a Norseman, calling upon a set of beings who have no good reason to answer the call to help secure the area does little or nothing. Certainly, it mixes in elemental symbolism that I would then argue isn't always universal. Certainly, it uses some color association that is, mostly, universal. However, for the most part, it is paradigm specific.

Just my thoughts, if you are going to head down this road and really want to make a difference, you should help people build raw strength first. No one was ever in a situation where they needed applied force saying "if only I wasn't so strong this would be easier."

person does not need to start by developing skills. They need to start with a stable foundation. Understanding these principles and learning to apply them to these practices is very potent in my experience. It’s how I know how to do things so it’s how I’m going to teach them.

For example people don’t need to be giving meditation exercises but instead need to be taught the course skills of meditation and what makes it work so they can develop a methoad that works for them.

If you don’t think these principles are the best option I encourage you to tell me what is in your opinion
That way I can educate myself on something new.

Dasadon wrote:person does not need to start by developing skills. They need to start with a stable foundation.

A stable foundation IS based on skills that can be used, that's the stable foundation.
Certain principles don't work with every person. But a simple banishing ritual for example can work for everyone.
And the more practice one has the better they become and the better they understand the matter.

Dasadon wrote: For example people don’t need to be giving meditation exercises but instead need to be taught the course skills of meditation and what makes it work so they can develop a methoad that works for them.

The core skills of meditation are best understood by practicing them in different exercises. With no hands on experience, all the knowledge will just be theoretical. And then after they have a theoretical foundation, they would still have to test that theoretical foundation and if it doesn't work, they would have to go back to the drawing board.
It's best to try different methods and see what works for you. But those are already exercises.

Have u ever gone to a gym class? Before they teach you about the different machines and how they work they first teach you about your body and how it work. They teach you the do’s and fonts.

Some principles don’t work? Dude these are not seperate. You don’t apply them Seperately you apply them together. They are parts of a whole.

For example if I take the principles of mentalism , rhythm, and vibration I can understand that when I meditate I need to have rhythmic breath at a frequency and I do all of this with mind.
Cause and effect: I meditate with an ententes to cause something to happen
Polarity: my breath goes in and out at a frequency(vibration)
Gender: some forms of meditation are more masculine like trataka and some are more feminine like fore example grounding exercises
Coraspondence: I use this when visualizing my breath as energy. This is used to create coraspondences(duuuuu) example: for me a red candle represents mars energy.

Dasadon wrote:Have u ever gone to a gym class? Before they teach you about the different machines and how they work they first teach you about your body and how it work. They teach you the do’s and fonts.

No, I haven't. You wouldn't need that if they give you strict exercises or show you how to do them.
Also not everyone listens to that or remembers and it still works for them.

Dasadon wrote: Some principles don’t work? Dude these are not seperate. You don’t apply them Seperately you apply them together. They are parts of a whole.

They don't need to be, you can separate them based on what works for you.
You can create your own paradigm if you want to.
Chaos magick, man, chaos magick.

They are ment to work together. If u seperate them only to find that they don’t work though then that’s on u for not using the tool as entended.
That’s what these are. Just tools.

Charles_Odinforce wrote:One of the greatest weaknesses of many banishing rituals is it doesn't explain, nor make use of, the personal power within the individual. It relies only on external forces, without building connections to those forces.

Would you mind sharing an example and/or indicating where to find an example of such a thing? The personal-power banishing, to be exact.

Crowley hints at it in his works, focusing very heavily on personal energy using techniques such as Yoga, though I'd be hard pressed to remember every piece of writing that he hits on it. He used an open-eyed meditation exercise in which one focuses on both feeling and the awareness of the energy around you. That is if I'm recalling this correctly, it may be a student of his who wrote on his works after (It's been over 15 years since I was read that).

Jason Miller, a more modern contemporary, hits a lot on the need to build personal energy before any work.

As for methods that work JUST through personal power alone, most still have formalized ritual (or the framework to use it) a look into QiGong and Shinto Mysticism hits on that more without the framework though. Likewise different Shamanic Journey practices focus on the rawness of power in the practitioner, but that's a scattered system.

So if you mean an example of JUST using that, its harder to find, but most QiGong practitioners can do it. I don't know that it's something they are as trained to do, as it is more the natural "I have a really powerful presence, and I know how to direct the energy of it" so it comes naturally after the training.

The most successful methods I've seen incorporate something like Qi in their foundation practices. The least successful simply focus on the explanation of a theory of energy. Personally, I'd prefer a beginner pick up the basics and not have an "explanation" that is dubious/biased at best than to have them inundated into dogma without core skills.

Many of these methods, such as Shamanism, also fall outside of western systemization where people learn more from an individual teacher and generally from hard training. Westernized mysticism is more concerned with building a good dogmatic foundation, focusing the idea that belief is power, and doesn't focus on harnessing raw power/energy/lifeforce or whatever you might want to call it.

The Hermetic Principals while a wonderful explanation to distract the mind from creating questions, and doubts, which break the student's attention is also still a very modern and western invention. Its principals are a mish-mash of scientific terminology meant to lend credence rather than experience initially. I find Hermetic Principals functional in my own work, but for the purposes of banishing indoctrination to a dogma should be secondary to building foundational energy.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Kundalini/Chakra oriented methods for building power in that way. Many of these systems operate on the understanding that if your energy is high, possession becomes impossible anyway, or banishing for another becomes a simple task of having greater power and authority at that moment.

Much of Western Mysticism works on the idea of "the appeal to the higher power" which is fine if that higher power happens to favor you. If they did though, would YOU need to call upon them for banishing? Would you need a full ritual? If you did need to call upon them, surely it would be only once.

I hope that answers the question fully because it is one of those loaded questions where "there is a lot of information on it, but its scattered across a lot of sources."

Sovereignty Is important when banishing. Having it your self is empowering but I see nothing rong with calling upon external forces.