If someone takes parts of Enochian and builds a new working system from it, they’re really just doing what Mathers did with John Dee’s notes in the first place. Dee himself wasn’t an occultist in the modern sense, he was a Christian mystic recording experiences and conversations. The “system” came later.
So the real question isn’t whether modifying a ritual is legit, it’s whether it works.
Most grimoires were never field manuals. They were theoretical texts, compilations, or manuscript traditions copied by people who often had very limited practical experience. That doesn’t make them worthless, but it does mean they aren’t canon in the way people sometimes treat them these days.
This is actually good news. It means there’s room for testing, and personal refinement. Spirits don’t care about candle color or robe fabric. Those elements are for the operator, not the operation. What consistently matters is intent, focus, and the quality of contact.
Once you’ve established repeatable contact through a ritual framework, you can begin removing what doesn’t serve you. If a spirit responds regardless of minor changes, that tells you what’s essential, and what’s cosmetic.
As for testing: you test rituals the same way anything else is tested. You repeat them, you observe results over time, and, if possible, you have trusted practitioners work them independently. Patterns emerge quickly when something is actually functional.
Many people eventually discover that the “power” isn’t in the ritual structure at all, but in what the ritual teaches them to do internally. At that point, streamlining happens naturally.
The only real limitation is choosing to stay boxed inside a system out of fear or reverence rather than curiosity. That part is a choice.
Last thing here because I think it matters. If you are a person who truly believes contact is only possible via robes and Latin, you are correct. If you are a person who truly believes that contact can only happen in Greek, you are correct. Your belief matters more here than you think.
Hope I answered at least part of your question. Take what resonates, burn the rest.
I think what FireBorn here said contains a lot of good information for OP's question.
To further to the discussion, I think we also need to consider how rituals are "created" or discovered. When we consider the grimoires and their rituals, we have to remember that many of them are actually transmissions through history from different sources. For example, if you consider Solomonic magick, its rituals, and its practices in sources such as the Lesser Key of Solomon or the various "Key of Solomon" manuscripts, many of the methods their derive themselves from a weird patchwork of Greek, Jewish / Kabbalah, and even Arabic sources. Ultimately, these techniques were copied over from grimoire to grimoire over time, but it doesn't really answer the question of how they were discovered and then later adapted into different forms. In the original sources, the surest thing we can say about the creation of these different rituals was definitely done through some form of personal gnosis and work. The older ancient magicians, occultists, and mystics surely ended up channeling / receiving these techniques through their own personal gnosis, recorded them in their magical records, and then tested them out. Then, they might have shared this knowledge to their disciples or fellow practitioners who then repeated the protocols and further made their own modifications over time. Eventually, these techniques and protocols end up getting patched together in the grimoires we see because maybe they made sense on a "theoretical level" or their was some limited practice that confirmed the usefulness of that method.
My main point going through this historical perspective is that the modification / streamlining of rituals find many parallels to the creation of rituals:
1. Personal Gnosis / Spiritual Revelation - Occultists not only use their own spiritual revelations to create entirely new rituals, but also use it to modify or streamline existing ones. It is quite common among the experienced and advanced occultists to directly commune with the spirits to answer questions on existing ritual structures. The spirits can provide answers to further modify or increase the effectiveness of what already exists because it is highly likely that they were the ones who provided this technology in the first place or at least are intimately familiar with it. The other possibility is that your own personal intuition provides the necessary insights into making modifications and this is especially quite powerful in chaos magick.
2.
Consultation of texts / traditions - Another common approach is for occultists to consult different occult traditions and texts to gain new understanding of existing techniques or to find additional techniques to add into a ritual. This was already discussed by considering the common historical patterns of grimoires, but it is equally valid for modern day occultists. A common one is the Gallery of Magick, whose works are primarily Kabbalah, but also potentially mix in techniques from other sources. Without saying the authenticity of some of their sources or whatever sense of gatekeeping they might impose, they definitely mix different techniques or approaches from different Kabbalistic sources together with some approaches that one could regard as new age visualization. They would obviously need to test these mixes out, but it is a legitimate way for them to streamline existing rituals. Sometimes, from a theoretical standpoint, it just makes sense logically or intuitively to mix different things, even if you have to generalise them from different traditions. In the end, these modifications work for many people. Again you will find this being a pretty common element in chaos magick thinking.
3. Testing alone and in groups - The final part of modifications / streamlining and creating rituals is always experimentation. FireBorn already did a great discussion on this, so I won't repeat too much of it. But the main point is that the scientific method is your friend here. You need a testing framework to use in order to gauge the results of your ritual before streamlining it. The framework itself obviously needs to account for observations of results, testing conditions, conclusions, and the criteria for judging success for the ritual. But I will diverge from the mainstream magical diary idea and say that your testing framework must be in accordance with your own beliefs. For some people, noting the astrological influences, correspondences, times, etc is helpful to determine the effect of different factors, but for other people it is a pointless exercise. You may not believe in the astrological side or the influences of certain timings for example and so trying to force that into your testing framework would not be very helpful. The best way is to pick a result / target that you can measure in some way with the ritual; it could be something you can count, how much you "feel" of something during a ritual, etc, but you do need to have a way of comparing success between different runs. You just choose these measures of success according to your own beliefs and then you iterate on the ritual. This applies to testing alone and in groups. Testing by yourself is a great way to get started, but unless if you hand the work to other independent people, you will not be able to get any "objective" sense of results and your analysis stays in UPG (unverified personal gnosis) land. A lot of the people who were inspired by GoM used Facebook group members to trial their rituals in order to collect feedback on how well their rituals work and then what they need to modify.
Personally, these are the 3 patterns I have observed over a few years of being semi-active, but quietly observing in the occult community. I hope this helps.
