Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash
The other day in the Magical Experiments Facebook group I was asked if I had a process for closing out of a ritual that I had shared in a book. I explained that I didn’t actually have a process for closing out of a ritual and that I don’t do closes with my rituals anymore. In fact, I haven’t closed out of a magical working for a long time now. I thought I would share why here.
Conventional wisdom in the occult would argue that it is essential to close out of a magical ritual so that you can banish any left over/unwanted influences from the working and so that you release the magical working to do its thing, while you go on with your life. Its argued that if you don’t do a close out of the ritual, you could be endangering yourself with the spirits you worth with or that the magical working won’t actually be executed. These are the reasons I’ve seen shared for why you want to close a ritual.
There’s another reason to close a ritual and that is for a sense of closure. Closure allows us to move from one space to another, and to do so in a way that is conclusive for the person. Closing a ritual because you need that sense of closure is another reason to do a close, if you want or need to.
But do you have to close a ritual? Do these reasons hold water? Or are we just agreeing to them because their conventional wisdom that hasn’t been challenged?
You know my response IS to challenge conventional wisdom. Sometime back I began to wonder why I was closing a ritual and decided to see what would happen if I didn’t close the ritual. And do you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened. I did the ritual and then went off and did my own thing. The magical working still executed and no spirits were wandering about, angry with me because I didn’t close the ritual.
Now there could be a specific reason for that. I do any extra magical work when I’m already doing my daily magical work. I figure why not just fold it all in and do it together. That daily magical work is focused on creating a specific, intentional space for me to work in and built into that space is specific parameters what is allowed in that space and what is kept out of that space. So maybe that’s why, but I stopped closing rituals long before I started doing the specific daily work I’m doing now and didn’t suffer any ill effects before.
Let me share why I do don’t closes for any magical workings I do. In the case of working with spirits, my feeling on it is that the spirits I work with are free to come and go as needed. I don’t compel them to appear or disappear, but instead work with them from a place of respect. I prefer they choose whether or not they want to be in the environment, and as I mentioned above, I’ve created an intentional space that mediates the influences that I’m working with, which the spirits are part of. So no matter what I still have access to what I need for a working and if the spirit shows up its and if not, that’s okay too.
In the case of a magical working that doesn’t involve spirits, I practice a discipline that I call banish by detachment, where instead of closing out the magical working, I simply detach and let it do it’s thing. I practice this discipline as a way to focus my mind and get clarity on what’s important at an given moment of time. It’s something I recommend to anyone who wants to practice detachment.
I’ll admit I also prefer to be in a space where the magic is active. I’ve found that living in such a space has significantly had a good impact on all the work I do. So I don’t close my rituals out and that’s why.
