All that is religious melts into self-help. Everything that used to be the property of the religious has melted into self-help. The death of God has produced more than just cultural malaise. It also led to syncretism in hopes of discovering a generic universal religious system. But what is really generic and universal is the brain structure that produces mystical experience, ethical intuition, and all other modes of awareness.

But the original purpose of religion was a better life, or a least a less painful one, first through placating Sky Alpha, and then through law (social order) and prophets (social welfare). With Christianity, a certain strain of Judaism became dominant—the belief strain. Yahveh wants belief. Do that, and good things will follow. The original impulse for enhancing survival (happiness) by pleasing Sky Alpha became institutionalized in Christianity as mere belief—a shortcut.

When God was alive, religion was a shortcut to happiness through a convoluted series of symbolic exercises —

Our People do not control the weather, crops, locusts, drought, or enemy invaders. Sky Alpha controls all that. To influence what cannot be influenced by local physical action, we flatter and serve (burn) meat to Sky Alpha, and he will reward us.

He rewards those who suck-up to him, and punishes those who do not. He demands attention by making lots of rules that require payment when you break them. Jesus’ meat was infinitely savory, so no more payments are required, except the payment of gratitude to Jesus for setting us free from the payment system.

When God died, religion retained its original impulse (happiness) and method (belief). But with God gone, it reduced to just being a way to happiness through short cuts. And that’s the very definition of self-help.

The reduction of religion to self-help is the triumph of Enlightenment self-interest over superstition. There is nothing in any religion that cannot be rebranded as a tool for your self-improvement toolbox.

Even the demons of the Goetia are helpful spirit friends now. Satanism is humanistic satire. Everything dangerous of the religious kind has become a genre of self-improvement.

I think we have Crowley to thank for this! And I’ve “collected” the essays that did it right here.

Proof: the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

All this is background to lead up to something actually funny. So I decided to Google LBRP today. The LBRP was originally a new Christian Kabbalistic bullshit ritual made by renegade Freemasons who were a bit smarter and more inventive than average. The Golden Dawn used the same format as Freemasonry: a handful of good ideas schematized through dramatic ritual and then sacralized through the awesome power of secret-keeping.

But instead of just the received two-act Hiram Abiff play they made up totally new stuff based on, well, something that we more mechanical. Instead of Yahveh, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, and Geometry, they added humoralist interpretation of the Empedoclean elements, planets and signs—an applied-psychological approach of inducing state change through external manipulation of objects that have sympathies with the internal energies to which everything alchemical corresponds. This lead inevitably to a system where people were encouraged to invent ceremonies of external-internal manipulation in a cookbook fashion.

So the LBRP was just everything a Gandalf-adoring American teen would love. You imagine the light of God pouring through you, then you also draw giant pentagrams while intoning magical words just like a real wizard. Then you crucify yourself and imagine two light beams intersecting at your center. Then you proclaim, while holding this Jesus Christ pose, that the nonlocal Yahveh consciousness is one with you (aka Atman is Brahman). Then you return to Ego.

An LBRP Primer

Some quick notes. A pentagram cannot help but be drawn in one of 10 possible ways. It is this kind of stuff that makes occult theater seem like science—it relies on real permutations restricted by the objects being constructed. I have to draw a circle in two directions. Bingo—so there “are two energies associated with the Circle.” In the pentagram case, the starting point of your drawing determines which of the five elements you are treating, while the starting direction determines whether you act is an invocation or a banishment. Is there force fitting? Yes—these old Brits wanted to draw a star so badly that they just added spirit to make a neat five. Why not? To the Empedoclean four the Greeks added aether; the Vedantins, Akasha; so why not?

From alchemy there were already local physical things that “corresponded with” (contained the energies of) this or that astrological essence—tin and Jupiter, lead and Saturn, and so on. These poetic-humoralist metaphors allowed for something like a faculty analysis of the subjective quale of experience. It ended up being an extensive vocabulary—7 from the planets, 12 from the signs, the 5 elements, the trumps of the tarot cards, and the human digit-based digits (1 – 10). Taken together, these basic essence Legos fit perfectly into the 32-slot system of Jewish mysticism, made of the 22 Hebrew letters and 10 digits.

Everything, meaning all phenomena, fit into these slots. Colors, odors, and the gods of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Hindu pantheons. By fitting the elements in each category of phenomenon, we can place them side-by-side and catch the occult essence that these particular data only imperfectly reflect. It is by comparison, reflection, and abstraction that essences are perceived. We compare two trees and note that they are different, then we reflect (back and forth) on their similarities (trunk, branches, and leaves are shared), and finally we name these commonalities and a universal/property/essence is born.

So we use that method here, and wind up with a consensus on the mystical entities that otherwise lack adequate terminology. In the theory of Adolf Bastian, we access the mystical-Jungian Elementargedanken through the Völkergedanken which are their local inflections.

Anyone who has taken a high school mythology class can fill in many of the columns themselves. For example, lets try fitting some gods into the 1 – 10 portion of the 32 rows. What are these numbers? Just use the traditional system that attributes ordinals to the planets in the Ptolemaic system, where Earth is at position 10, Moon at 9, Mercury at 8, and so on. Now, where would you put Mars, Ares, Horus, and Thor? Yes—they all reveal the martial essence, so they all go on the same row. Which one? Yes—they belong to row 5, the position of Mars. Lo and behold, the fifth sephirah in the kabbalistic Tree of Life is Geburah (גבורה), which means severity or delimiting force, just what you would hope to find in a consistent system.

Anyway, that’s the background that made the LBRP—and everything else in post-Blavatsky DIY recipe-style Freemasonry—meaningful. Symbols have assigned meanings. They refer to subtle phenomenal essences and faculties of experience. Now, this is a metaphorical and clumsy language and a total joke compared to any of the Indian systems, where the “occultists” took their researches seriously and used actually helpful terminology and exhaustive descriptive analyses. But it better than what Christianity offered, which was all Bhakti and nothing by way of mysticism-driven metaphysics.

So here are the steps:

The LBRP’s changing public image

To summarize: The LBRP was concocted as a “preliminary” ritual that cleansed the subjective mood by “banishing the element of Earth” and replacing it with openness to the all-loving all-permeating Source that is constantly revealing and unpacking itself through the physical churning of the expanding spacetime that sustains (and finally atomizes) you.

The LBRP was originally fabricated in 1890 using the new correspondence cookbook worldview described above. It was known by very few people. The Golden Dawn was a private and marginal club for British eccentrics and esotericists like Crowley, MacGregor Mathers, and Allan Bennett.

It was referenced in the 1950s by early Wiccans like Doreen Valiente, Stewart and Janet Farrar, Alex Saunders, and less so by later political ones like Margot Adler, Starhawk, and Green Party activist Selena Fox. All of them are the intellectual descendants of Crowley since they all cited his forgeries for Gerald Gardner as their founding texts. But because the LBRP was aligned with the glitter (and high production values) of the GD’s Egyptian-Kabbalistic temple aesthetics, it had lost favor with most American occultists, which were now almost all Wiccan, and was replaced by more soothing and rustic hippie ceremonies in horned headdresses and robes set in the woods.

From 1967 to 1982, knowledge of the LBRP grew beyond the Mathers-Crowley circle thanks to a few “general occultism” writers who appreciated (and interpreted) the ritual independently of the Golden Dawn and Crowley context. It became a generic “traditional ritual;” but it was still only known by a few serious occultists.

Then, in 1982, TBN brought knowledge of Crowley to millions of American Christian Fundamentalists, and it became an authentic Satanic practice written down in actual books written by authoritative Satanists. It was the birth of the Satanic Panic, and the LBRP was taken to be a literal gateway to Hell that was even more effective than playing AD&D or listening the Led Zeppelin backwards.

So by the mid-1980s, the LBRP was evidence of hardcore Satanism. Even seeing a pentagram was enough to make people freak out. TBN had specials teaching parents the “warning signs” of their children’s involvement in “Satanism and the occult.” The idea of a child in his bedroom, with a painted bedsheet on the floor, wearing a robe, holding a wand or dagger, intoning “magical” words (Hebrew), and tracing a pentagram in imaginary blue flame would be a horror worse than any horror film.

Fast forward to today’s Internet search. The Google results listed links to Simplicity Lifestyle, Pregnancy Yoga, Love Yourself, and Personal Feng Shui Today websites.

Self-help is postmodern religion’s basin of attraction

Every generation colors the currents that run through it. The aim of the Enlightenment is the translation of our most important metaphors into either quantity or nothing. Every religious act, no matter how zany its original motivation, is now seen as a placebo in the rough.

Note that doing this also converts the thing into a value, that can be produced and sold. When I Googled “feng shui,” the top result was a feng shui consultant in Austin.

To be a valid occult practice today is to be purchasable on the Internet and, more importantly, target to the median consumer using the right stylistics. Elaborate (expensive) ceremonial magic of the Mathers-Crowley type? No one has the money, study-habits, self-control, or patience to study the art of subduing and then commanding naughty demons by threatening them, or reminding them of their inferiority to Yahveh, who is their master and tormentor. Hellfire club? No one will buy a dangerous and potentially revolutionary political organization that sublimates its real material desires as theatrical mockery; that’s just corrosive and inflammatory.

But you could sell both of these if you worked them into a metal concert or witty piece of performance art, or a rave, or a dues-paying cult, or a postmodern social happening. Any practice that requires practice and effort is hard to market. But something you can wear, like a pentagram T-shirt from Hot Topic, requires no effort, and the buyer gets the same quality of social recognition.

Anyway, it was funny to see the LBRP marketed on the Internet as one of Oprah’s Love Yourself Now! and Gift Yourself More Me Time! practices. Amazing how things change.

P.S. — I finally saw Hereditary last month and thought it was a predictable bore until the last 10 minutes, and then felt so happy that I almost cried! I Googled Paimon and, yes, I found lovely pendants and jewelry for the Lifetime TV Network housewives. Incredible.