FAQ

The ritual is from the (real) Book of Abramelin the Mage and is known as "The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel". The goal is to summon your Guardian Angel and ask it for a favor (you and the person who escorted you through the ritual will each be granted a wish, which is why Solomon is willing to do it with Sophia.) Solomon explains that this is all very literal - they will be dealing with real magic, real demons, and real angels.

He also claims that their ritual has nothing to do with God and is "much darker" than the Kabbalah, possibly suggesting that they are using the ritual to essentially trick the angel into appearing.

When he asked her why she wanted to do the ritual she said "I love someone, but they don't love me back," and he immediately walked out of the house and asked to be taken back to the train.

He knows that this ritual is excrutiatingly demanding. They're going to be in the house for months with nothing to do and no outside contact, while undergoing physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausting practices, over and over again. Most people would give up after weeks of doing that with no visible results.

He mentions to her that "you've got to have the right person," and what he means is that the person undergoing the ritual has to be driven to the point of obsession.

When she says she wants to talk to her dead child, he changes his mind because he knows that an obsessed mother trying to reach her lost son could very well be driven enough to endure what she's going to have to endure.

She needs someone who knows the mechanics of the ritual, and he claims to have done this successfully once before (out of three attempts.) When they first meet he quizzes her about who she's already spoken to before finding him, implying that she did a lot of research and put in a lot of effort to find her own "right person."

At the beginning of the ritual, when Solomon used salt to draw a circle around the house, he warned that once he completed it they would not be able to leave until the ritual was complete. And that was the literal truth, just like he warned that they would be dealing with literal demons and angels. The house had become, through their trials, disconnected from the rest of reality.

It was partially in the real world, but also partially in a more heightened reality as evidenced by the increased coincidences that they start to notice and the way actions and consequences become more closely tied together - she tells a lie, and Solomon instantly cuts himself. And he catches the lie just because of the cut - he looks down at his hand and immediately asks her "Did you just lie?"

And until they complete the ritual, one way or another, they can't leave the reality of the house and reconnect to the rest of the world.