Warding circles are used to define and protect a space for a variety of reasons. Witches and magicians use them to protect our homes from unfriendly spirits and mortals. We also use them to define and preserve our ritual areas between formal rites.
The pentagram ward is the rite I found, so long ago, misrepresented as the Lesser Banishing of the Pentagram. They are admittedly similar, but the Lesser Banishing is a ceremonial rite, requiring a ceremonial magician’s tools and formal incantations. My pentagram ward is somewhat simpler.
The pentagram – with or without a circle around it – is a symbol of elemental power, representing the microsm. Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit. A ward drawn with such a glyph draws power both from the idea of the pentagram and from the elemental energies of the physical and astral planes.
A warding circle begins, as do all rites, with grounding and centering. Breathe.
Face forward and focus your will. Using one’s tool of choice – knife, wand, sword, hand, eye – draw a pentacle in the air in front of you; fill it with enough power that it glows before your eyes and stays where you put it.
Focus your will on the rightmost point of that pentacle in the air and turn 90 degrees to your right, drawing a quarter-circle line as you go. At the edge of the line you have just drawn, cut another pentacle in the air and fill it with your will as you did the first.
Repeat this process twice more, drawing a total of four pentacles in the air, one in each of the four directions: before, right, behind, and left. The left circle being charged, complete the greater circle with a final quarter-turn. Feel the circle snap closed, feel it fill with power.
Your ward is complete. It’s simple. Magicians might even scoff. But it does the trick under most circumstances, and it makes an excellent framework upon which to hang more sophisticated protections.