For six years I have read the letters that come to the Gate. Most are from people who wish to join us. A fair number are from people who do not wish to join anything, but who have been practicing alone from books and have frightened themselves. They cannot sleep, or the house feels wrong, or a working that was done in March is still, as one of them put it, "following me from room to room." I am not permitted to advise them about practice, since they are not members. But I may say here, in general, what almost every one of those letters has in common. It describes an opening without a closing.
What banishing is
The word is unfortunate. It suggests driving something out: an exorcism, with the practitioner as a person under attack. The Guild keeps the word because it is traditional, and teaches it as something much plainer. To banish is to return a place, and oneself, to a neutral condition. It is done before a working, so that the work begins on a clean bench. And it is done after, so that the work ends.
In the Guild the banishing is the Rite of the Four Gates, in its opening and closing halves. Other schools have other forms. The form matters less than the fact that it is done, every time, in full.
Three things it does
It marks a beginning and an end. The mind does not change state because we wish it to. It changes state on a signal, and a signal that has been given a thousand times is obeyed without argument. The closing half of the Gates, after a year of daily use, is such a signal. It says that the rite is over, and the whole person believes it.
It restores the level. A rite deliberately heaps up one kind of thing: the fire of Mars, the gravity of Saturn. That is its purpose. But one cannot go to the grocer's in the gravity of Saturn. The banishing returns the practitioner to the middle, with the four elements standing equal at the four quarters and the lamp at the center.
It trains the will on a small scale. The Gates are a complete ceremony in six minutes: a purpose, an opening, an address, a close. An Apprentice who has done them three hundred times has performed three hundred rites, and has finished every one. No other training in the Art is so compact.
Why it comes first
We teach closing before we teach opening, for the reason that a driving instructor teaches the brake before the accelerator. The Apprentice spends a year on the Lamp and the Gates, and works nothing else. Members have sometimes complained of this. I have not heard the complaint from anyone who has reached Keeper.
Signs of a poor closing
- Restlessness or a strange elation that lasts for hours after a rite.
- Broken sleep on the night of a working, with the rite replaying.
- A sense that the room in which the work was done is "still on."
- Irritability the next day, in the character of whatever was invoked.
None of these is sinister. All of them mean the same thing: something was begun and not ended. The remedy is to go back to the bench, light the lamp, and close the Gates properly, aloud, with full attention, even if a day has passed.
Homely banishings
The formal rite is not the only means. The old hands of every Chapterhouse know a dozen others, and none of them is beneath a Master's dignity. Wash your hands and face in cold water. Eat something, preferably something plain. Open a window. Put the instruments away and the robe on its hook. Go for a walk and notice ten ordinary things. Laugh, if anything is funny, and after a solemn rite something usually is. The table at which a Chapterhouse eats after working is not an indulgence. It is the last part of the closing.
The last skill
I have called banishing the last skill as well as the first, and I mean it literally. The Elders of the Guild, who have set down every office and nearly every practice, still open and close the Gates each day. One of them told me that after forty years she no longer thought of it as a rite. "It is how I come into a room," she said, "and how I leave it." I can think of no better account of what we are trying to teach.