Well, prayer is just another way of doing magick, so as with magick, it depends on the practitioner, their abilities to move energy, their belief and lack of doubt.
It’s not gamified into levels though, and while “having armour” against physical melee combat is a good analogy and can be used as a thoughtform, it’s not like that becsuse there are many more ways to run foul of unwanted energy than some dude trying to hit you with a medeval weapon. This is not physical so relying only on physical analogies and the symptoms of reality that work in a place with gravity, even temps, air and rules of physics can be overly limiting to your application. You’ll can roast alive in a suit of armour, or freeze, or be bound, or be sent mad, or anything else that the armour isn’t designed to stop.
It’s not quantity it’s quality and intelligence that counts more in magickal battles. They are more psychological than mechanical… Your physical body is not the one being attacked, your qi, astral/mental and emotional bodies are.
There will always be attacks, parasites, self-created crap and energy issues you didn’t account for. If you do astral combat against human mages they can simply choose to not be affected by your shields.
So while you absolutely want to set up “armour” against your average and expected day to day astral wildlife, you need more than this. I would say you need a strongly dynamic ability to intelligently recognize and counter issues as well as passive protection.
Be able to: (off the top of my head, I’m running through the kinds of common issues you’d rather have not happen to your energy)
- recognise and counter incoming attacks, obviously, but both psychological as well as astral combat, or a bad luck curse, or mental influence etc etc
- Be able to tell the difference between ambient shitty energy, self created shitty energy, normal human sickness and attacks,
- be able to fix leaks and imbalances in your qi, from normal sickness or magickal
- know how to take care of yourself and repair imbalance after damage
- Recognise vampiric and poisonous attachments and how to remove them
- Recognise influence on your mind and emotions, whether from normal human empathy or attack
- Recognise indirect attacks, such as on those around you, on your luck, your car, your relationships (sour jars etc), your house, eg chaos magic attempts to burn your house down with you in it (rare but happens).
- Know how to not invite parasites into you, and banish and cleanse them when they appear, including organisational mind virus “mass psychosis” type parasitic thoughtforms
- Find and remove bindings and compulsions
- Find and remove blocks and restrictions in your qi body from past trauma (these are lije energetic scars) that can also be sites for leskage and parasite attachment or mental/emotional manipulative attacks
I think praying generally attempts to simplify all this by asking a deity to deal with the details, but that is risky and then when shitty things happen, the deity isn’t blamed for failing or it’s it’s will anyway. I think it generally doedn’t work that well, magickally speaking, it gives a basic shield and doesn’t help with combat or deliberate attack or parasites.
After that it comes down to what’s in your toolbox of techniques and skills. You can’t heal what you don’t know about and can’t see. You can perform protection rituals all day but you’ll not cover 100% of situations you can face, so don’t waste time doing that: hit the 80/20 rule and have skills to deal with the 20% of unexpected conditions.
