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In the last post, I mentioned attending Penczak’s classes when talking about oath making with spirit lovers specifically. Today I want to discuss the idea of a ‘readiness check’.

This was not something we discussed directly within his invocation class, but was a concept I was able to pick up on during a practical exercise. I want to be clear that this isn’t a readiness check in mundane terms, which refers to making sure all the things you need to perform the ritual are prepared. This is a readiness check that is designed to help you determine whether you should perform the working.

A readiness check works like this: You’re doing or are about to do some sort of ritual or working. You add an additional step to that working or within your preparation which has the sole purpose of telling you whether or not you should continue. If you fail the readiness check and aren’t able to continue, you then reflect on what happened and figure out why that might have been.

This is a super simple concept to understand, but it isn’t one that I’ve seen discussed almost at all. Practitioners often discuss what makes you prepared or not, all of which is usually helpful information that stresses personal introspection.

However, when you’re performing or about to perform a ritual, you can always make a mistake or miss something. Implementing a readiness check into serious individual workings can go a long way in helping to prevent misfires or bad outcomes.

In the rest of this blog post, we’ll look at the readiness checks we went through in Penczak’s class, and how you might go about implementing a readiness check in your personal ritualism.

How did Penczak’s Readiness Check Work?

During the invocation exercise I did within the class, there were actually three different readiness checks before the invocation actually happened. All of these were places within Penczak’s guided visualization that we would get stuck within if we weren’t prepared to continue.

The first check was The Blood Red River

At this point, we would be walking upstream next to a red river. Depending on where our minds were, some of us might want to submerge ourselves into this blood colored stream. If you did this, you could end up stuck there within the visualization.

To me this did a good job at checking the practitioner’s focus. It felt like it was meant to be distracting. Even though a strange part of me definitely wanted to jump into the river, it was correct to let that urge pass and remain focused.

Next was The Creaking Bridge

As we walked upstream, we found that we had to cross over that same river to an island sitting in the middle of its wide rapids. Some people had very sturdy bridges, some had creaky ones or dangerous ones, and some may not have had a bridge at all. My bridge fell very much into the ‘creaky and dangerous’ category, with missing and dangling planks and the oldest looking ropes you’ve ever seen.

This part made me think of the idea of the ‘leap of faith’. Invocations take a great deal of trust, in the spirit we are invoking and in ourselves, because they can be genuinely uncomfortable experiences. We had to be willing to trust the entity and ourselves.

Even though my bridge was in tatters I simply walked through the air to reach the other side when its planks wouldn’t carry me. This was the most difficult part for me, likely because I have at times struggled with trust in myself, which was reflected in my bridge.

Right before the invocation, we were met with The Gatekeeper

After crossing the bridge, we’d meet the asshole of the hour, who would allow or deny entry to the temple grounds where we would perform our invocation. We could talk our way past him, scale the walls, or gain entrance in any other way that worked for us.

The gatekeeper test felt designed to turn you away if you weren’t prepared, which is very important for a publicly available class like this one. More than that, I felt my strength of will was being tested. My gatekeeper was a jerk, almost inviting me to force my way through. By demanding he let me in and being a bit of a jerk back he begrudgingly let me through the gate.

I was fascinated by the way these readiness checks lowered risk without taking away from the invocation. This was very important for a public class like this; the last thing we’d want is to sign up for a class with a lack of guard-rails.

How Should We implement our own Readiness Checks?

Penczak’s class shows the first type of readiness check: readiness checks that are worked into the ritual itself. Here we had three different checks, but for your own purposes you could include more or less. You would add sections to your ritual that are designed to make sure that you’re ready to continue, while fitting in with the rest of the ritual as much as possible. In this case it was the majority of the guided meditation.

This isn’t as simple to do as it sounds, and this is for two reasons. The first is the obvious one: You need to choose readiness checks that work with the ritual you’re doing as much as possible, while also testing the right things. Visualization that happens while you meditate is a fantastic medium for this, as we saw within the class.

The second is in the design of the ritual. To be frank, a lot of rituals aren’t designed with several readiness checks like this in mind. Adding readiness checks is adding bloat to the ritual. No matter how well implemented the readiness checks are, they’re saying something that’s different from the rest of your ritual. Even if all your checks are green lights, if not handled carefully they can detract from the ritual itself.

For these reasons, I think that the example from the class was unique in that this was one of the best places to implement this. Penczak was leading the guided meditation, knew where he wanted to take it, and knew what general trials he should set before we got there. This was fantastic in that classroom context, but in personal ritualism where you’re leading yourself, it becomes much harder.

For personal use, I’ve found that divination is the way to go for a readiness check.

It’s something you can do separately, can interpret individually, and can use to get other perspectives, all before you begin the ritual itself. There’s no risk of bloating your ritual with a bunch of messy and distracting readiness checks.

It’s also far easier to implement. Spread out some tarot cards, pull some runes, swing a pendulum, whatever you fancy. Ask if you should continue with your ritual as planned. No specially designed test to best fit with your working.

Look at the result, identify whether it’s leaning yes or no, and if it’s no, try to understand why that is. Alternatively, use something like a choice spread, with no on one side and yes on the other, and weigh up your two options. Then proceed based on your result.

In particular when doing a tarot spread for making decisions, I like to have the subject in the middle with one decision on the left (usually no or the negative response) and the other on the right (usually yes or the positive response). I like to use 3-5 cards on each side of the subject card to get the full picture. Sometimes I organize these based on the question.

So in this case, the subject in the middle would represent the ritual I want to perform, the left would be why I shouldn’t continue, and the right would be why I should. Depending on the ritual, I might organize certain cards on each side into specific topics. This gives me enough to chew on to make a reasonable decision about whether or not I should continue.

The biggest downside to this approach is that to get more out of it than a simple yes or no you will need a little experience doing divination. I always find that reading for myself is a bit more challenging than reading for others too, especially if I’m already predisposed towards one choice. You could definitely get a yes or no out of it without any practice by setting some simple rules, but that’s just a traffic light without context.

When Should You Use This?

Should you do this for every ritual? While it certainly wouldn’t hurt, it’s pretty obvious that there are all sorts of rituals that really don’t carry any major risk to the practitioner. Summoning a spirit lover is Not one of these, so if you’re still waiting to pull the trigger on that, a readiness check the day of is probably a good idea.

However, when you’re just going to participate in a public ritual to celebrate one of the holidays, or do some personal prosperity ritual, or anything else that’s generally considered to be plain, easy, and risk free, it’s unlikely a readiness check is going to tell you anything you don’t already know.

Since there isn’t any major risk in these situations, there’s little practical use in doing one. Unless you’re focusing too much on ritual and magick in your life in general, a readiness check isn’t likely to show you very much besides a green light for these kinds of workings.

you can also use divination in a similar way after the ritual, at which point the readiness check becomes a troubleshooting method.

Using divination is very normal if you don’t think your ritual worked. It can help you determine if something went wrong and where. Sometimes this won’t be about the ritual itself as much as how (or if) the results manifested at all. This is because sometimes these workings give us results that are outside the bounds of what we’d usually expect, and in those cases we might think they’ve fizzled entirely when they didn’t.

In that case, the spread becomes less about a yes/no and more about the ‘why’. Did it fizzle, and if so, why? Why didn’t I notice a result if it did work? Is there something else I’m missing about what happened? Ask questions like these and you’ll be more likely to succeed or see how the magick manifested next time.

Ultimately, while readiness checks within a ritual were very helpful during Penczak’s class, the divinatory approach has much more value for most people when working individually. While it can be easy to get a yes or no answer out of it, actually interpreting it takes some degree of experience with your chosen divination method, which can be frustrating if you keep getting hit with an endless sea of ‘not today’ from your readiness checks.

Give a readiness check a try next time you’re doing something that’s a little more intense or carries bigger consequences, like making Oaths or Summoning a Spirit Lover. It could end up saving your metaphysical bacon before something goes terribly wrong, or give you insight into how to get the ritual to work the way you want it to.