Go far enough into tarot advice and you’ll meet two kinds of ritual. The first kind is simple and everyday: knock three times on a new deck, leave it on the windowsill under a full moon, pass it through smoke, keep it wrapped in silk. The second kind has robes on. Somewhere in a forum thread, someone will mention that they perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram before serious readings, and if you look that up you’ll find archangels, Hebrew divine names, and instructions to vibrate words while drawing five-pointed stars in the air.
At which point most people quietly close the tab, wondering whether they’ve wandered out of “card game with feelings” and into something else entirely.
Stay. This post is a plain-English tour of both kinds of ritual: what the Lesser Banishing Ritual actually is (it’s more historically important to tarot than most people realise), what deck cleansing customs involve, what all of it is genuinely doing (something real, and not quite what the packaging says), and how we’ve built ritual into readings at 78Paths, including a full guided version of the old ceremony for those who want it, and a skip button for those who don’t. That skip button, as you’ll see, is a philosophical position.
What the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram Actually Is
The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP, to its friends) comes from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Victorian ceremonial magic society founded in 1888. If that name rings a bell on a tarot site, it should: the Golden Dawn and its members did more to shape modern tarot than anyone since the deck’s inventors. The card meanings most readers use today, the elemental attributions, the whole symbolic system, run straight through that order. Our own standard deck follows the Golden Dawn current. So when tarot people perform a Golden Dawn ritual before readings, it isn’t a random crossover; it’s the same family tree. The Hierophant could be the ritual’s portrait, and the deck’s tagline for him could be its definition: the sacred made into ritual.
The ceremony itself takes about ten minutes and has a clear structure:
- The Qabalistic Cross. You touch forehead, chest, right shoulder, left shoulder, then the heart, saying a Hebrew word slowly at each point (Ateh, Malkuth, ve-Geburah, ve-Gedulah, le-Olam: “Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever”). If that sounds familiar, it should; it’s a close cousin of the close of the Lord’s Prayer, traced on the body.
- The four quarters. Facing each compass direction in turn, you draw a five-pointed star in the air and speak a divine name at each: east, south, west, north, then close the circle.
- The archangels. Standing at the centre, arms out: “Before me, Raphael; behind me, Gabriel; on my right hand, Michael; on my left hand, Uriel,” each visualised at their quarter.
- The cross again, closing the ritual where it began.
Practitioners describe the purpose as clearing the space and the self before serious work: banishing distraction, stray influence, whatever you’d rather not bring into the circle. Traditions differ on how literally to take that. What nobody who has actually done it disputes is the effect: you finish those ten minutes in a very different state from the one you started in.
That’s the short version. If you want to actually learn the ritual, with every word’s pronunciation and meaning, the visualisations, the full history, and a four-week plan for learning it by heart, we’ve written a complete step-by-step guide as a companion to this post.
That state-change is the interesting part, and we’ll come back to it, because it’s the honest answer to what all of this is for.
The Everyday Rituals: Deck Cleansing, Charging, and Friends
Down at the simpler end, tarot has gathered dozens of small customs for “cleansing” a deck: after buying it, after a heavy reading, after someone else handles it, or just periodically, the way you’d wash a mug. The common ones, briefly and fairly:
- Knocking: rap the deck three times to “clear” it. The oldest and simplest reset.
- Moonlight: leave the deck on a windowsill under a full moon to cleanse and “charge” it.
- Smoke: pass the cards through incense or herb smoke. (If you use white sage, source it thoughtfully; it’s over-harvested and sacred to several Native American traditions. Ordinary incense does the same job.)
- Sorting: return the deck to its original order, Fool to King of Pentacles, then shuffle fresh. A hard reset, and genuinely satisfying.
- Salt: burying the deck in salt is sometimes advised. As card-lovers we’ll just say: salt scratches, pulls in moisture, and your deck is paper. Please don’t.
- Silk and boxes: wrapping or boxing the deck between uses, marking it as a thing apart.
Do these do anything? Here’s our honest answer, and it’s the same one we gave about whether tarot itself works: yes, something real, and the something lives in you rather than in the cards.
What Ritual Is Actually Doing (The Part Nobody Puts on the Label)
Card stock cannot hold a grudge, an energy, or the residue of your last argument. We’d be a strange tarot site to pretend otherwise; everything we’ve written about how readings work locates the power at your side of the table, and cleansing is no exception. What actually builds up between readings isn’t on the cards. It’s in you: the day’s noise, the last scroll session, the argument you’re still rehearsing, the outcome you’re already attached to before you’ve asked the question. A reading done through all that static is a mirror used in bad light.
Ritual is the light switch, and psychology has studied the mechanism from several angles. A fixed sequence of physical actions marks a boundary between ordinary time and focused time, the same way an athlete’s pre-shot routine or a liturgy does; researchers find rituals measurably reduce anxiety and improve focus even in people who don’t believe in them, which is a genuinely funny result and a deeply useful one. Slow deliberate movement and controlled breath downshift the nervous system (we’ve written about that machinery too). And naming what you’re setting down, distraction, dread, other people’s opinions, is the same externalizing move that makes the cards themselves work.
Read the LBRP through that lens and it’s almost suspiciously well-engineered: orienting the body in space (four quarters), paced breath and vocalisation (the spoken names), visualisation that crowds out rumination (four archangels are a lot to picture), all bracketed by an opening and closing gesture. Victorian ritual magicians built, by trial and centuries of inherited practice, a ten-minute attention machine. The banishing works. What it reliably banishes is everything your attention was carrying when you walked in, and that was always the thing standing between you and a clear reading. The Ace of Swords names the result: the truth, sharp and clean.
None of this debunks the practice, any more than explaining why cathedrals move people debunks cathedrals. If anything it explains why the customs survived: they earn their keep. It just relocates the work from the cardboard to the person, which is where every good thing about tarot lives anyway.
How We Do It at 78Paths (Robes Optional, Skip Button Included)
Knowing all that, here’s the position we’ve built into the site, and you can now see why it’s a position rather than an accident.
We built the full ritual in. Readings on 78Paths can open with a guided, on-screen version of the classic ceremony: the Qabalistic Cross, breath-paced; the charging of the quarters with the traditional names; the closing cross. It’s there as a standalone practice too. We built it faithfully, timed it to your breathing, and treated the tradition with the respect the Golden Dawn’s tarot lineage has earned from anyone who uses their card meanings, which is to say, nearly everyone.
And there’s always a skip button. Call it the whole philosophy in one UI element. The ritual is a door into the focused state, not a toll booth in front of the cards. Some nights the ten guided minutes are exactly what you need, and the reading you do afterwards will be noticeably clearer; the state-change is real and you’ll feel it. Other nights you have four minutes and one honest question, and the cards will meet you there too. Nothing is required. Nothing bad happens to the unbanished. The deck doesn’t check your paperwork.
If you want a middle path, here’s the two-minute version we’d suggest, which keeps the old ritual’s engineering and leaves the vocabulary to taste. Call it the Four Quarters, Minus the Angels: stand up, feet planted. Face each wall of the room in turn, and at each one, breathe out slowly and name one thing you’re setting down before the reading: the to-do list at the first wall, other people’s opinions at the second, the day’s noise at the third, and, at the fourth, the answer you’ve already decided you want. That last one is the real banishing, and no archangel required. Then sit, and ask your question.
And for cleansing a deck, digital or paper: our version is the question itself. One honest question, held while the deck shuffles, does what the knocking and the moonlight were always for; it clears everything that isn’t the reading out of the reading. If you love the moonlight anyway, so do we. Some customs are worth keeping purely because they’re beautiful.
The Bottom Line
The Lesser Banishing Ritual is a Victorian ceremony from the same order that gave modern tarot its meanings: ten minutes of breath, movement and visualisation that reliably produce a cleared, focused state, whatever else you believe is happening. Deck cleansing customs are the same machine in miniature. The energy being cleared was always the static in your own attention, and far from debunking the rituals, that’s exactly why they work.
So: do the full ceremony if it calls to you, ours is guided and free; do the two-minute secular version if that’s your speed; or skip the lot and bring one honest question, which was always the load-bearing part. The ritual serves the reading, never the other way round.
A cleansed deck is a cleared mind wearing a costume. Wear the costume if you like it. Either way, arrive.
FAQ
What is the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram? A short ceremonial ritual from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888): the Qabalistic Cross traced on the body, banishing pentagrams drawn at the four compass quarters with divine names spoken aloud, a call to four archangels, and a closing cross. Practitioners use it to clear the space and themselves before magical or divinatory work, including tarot. We keep a full step-by-step guide with pronunciations, meanings and history.
Do I need to do the LBRP before reading tarot? No. It’s a Golden Dawn practice some readers value, not a requirement of tarot, and most readers have never performed it. What it reliably provides is a focused, settled state before the reading, and you can reach that state by lighter means: a breathing routine, a two-minute quiet ritual, or simply holding one honest question. We offer a guided version for those who want the full tradition, with a skip button for everyone else.
How do you cleanse a tarot deck? Common methods: knocking three times, moonlight on a windowsill, passing the cards through incense smoke, or re-sorting the deck into its original order and shuffling fresh. Avoid salt, which damages card stock. Honestly, the method matters far less than the moment of reset it marks; pick the one that feels right and let it do that job.
Do you really need to cleanse tarot cards at all? The cards themselves accumulate nothing; what needs clearing between readings is your own attention. A cleansing custom is a ritualised way of doing exactly that, which is why the practice persists and why skipping it harms nothing. New deck, heavy reading, other hands on your cards: if a reset ritual helps you arrive clear, it’s working. If you arrive clear without one, you’ve lost nothing.
Does a new tarot deck need a ritual before first use? Only if you’d enjoy one. A first-use ritual (a knock, a night of moonlight, looking through all 78 cards in order) is really a way of marking the start of a relationship with the tool, like naming a boat. It sets intention and makes the object feel yours. The deck will read identically either way; you may not, and that’s the point.
What happens if you don’t cleanse or banish before a reading? Nothing dramatic; you simply read with whatever attention you walked in with. If you’re scattered, the reading tends to be scattered, not because anything clung to the cards but because you’re the instrument. That’s the whole case for ritual in one line: it tunes the instrument, and you’re the instrument.
Want to try the old ceremony properly? Run the guided cleansing ritual →, breath-paced and free, then pull a reading while the quiet lasts. Or skip straight to the cards with one honest question. Both doors open onto the same room.
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