Duncan Barford writes of being molested by a night hag while on a meditation retreat. He describes how visualising a flaming pentagram repelled it the first night it happened, but the visitation persisted. Upon consulting one of the Buddhist teachers running the centre, they advised that the Buddha had plenty of experience with ghosts and taught that the most effective way to deal with them was the Buddhist practice of “metta” or loving kindness. The next time the horror crept up on him in the night and he felt it trying to get into bed with him, rather than visualising a hermetic pentacle he visualised a stream of golden radiance from his heart chakra, bathing the horrible creature in compassion and kindness. He internally chanted “may you be well, may you be happy, may you be full of joy”, and really tried to mean it.
In his words “It worked a treat. It didn't simply repel the thing, the way a pentacle does; it dealt with it. The metta seemed to dissolve the entity. It had wanted my heart but instead the metta gave it something it needed just as much-only it hadn't known it.The metta worked so powerfully I even started to giggle, although I'd been screaming the moment before. It just seemed so absurd: here was this horrible thing trying to suck my heart dry and I was lying there wishing it all the best...
Yeah? Eat metta, you evil dipshit!”
The story can be found in The Urn, part of the Baptists Head trilogy (where my quote is from) and also I think he mentions it in Occult Experiments In The Home, although I may be wrong. Both books can be found in the library here should you wish to read them.
It may seem antithetical to try love and compassion against a malevolent entity, but actually it makes sense. We neutralise something with its opposite. This will rely on you having pretty good visualisation skills and also the fortitude to do so in the face of an assault, but these are things we as magicians should be practicing anyway.
