Evocation

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Evocation is an act of calling a spiritual or "mystical" being. It is a common practice in several religions.

The person, priest or "magic man" will perform a rite that gives that being space in our universe. The being would then be able to be controlled by the shaman doing the rite.

Religions that use this type of ritual are often misjudged and criticized by the public. The amount of actual "ritual" sacrifice or satanic worship is not the focus for this. It is a practice held sacred by the American Indian Tribes, most early religion bases and even in biblical times. This rite is not a "secret" in the society. It is common, practiced openly and is known to some as prayer. Evocation is the magical art of calling forth spirits, angels or demons to bring spiritual inspiration, do the bidding of the magician or provide information.

The first use of the term evocation was for the religious/magical practice of calling the tutelary deities of a city out of it so attackers could succeed in their conquest. In more recent usage, evocation refers to the calling out of lesser spirits (beneath the deific or archangelic level), sometimes conceived of as arising from the self. This sort of evocation is contrasted with invocation, in which spiritual powers are called into the self from a divine source.

The calling forth of spirits is a vital element of most traditions of magic all over the world. In the Western esoteric tradition, the classical example of this idea is in the magic of the grimoires. In medieval European magic the grimoires were sourcebooks of magical procedure, rooted in late classical sources and the work of early Arabic and Jewish magicians. Manuals such as the Greater Key of Solomon the King, The Lesser Key of Solomon (or Lemegeton), the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and many others provided instructions that combined intense devotion to the divine with the summoning of a personal cadre of spiritual advisers and familiars.

The grimoires provided a variety of methods of evocation. The Spirits are, in every case, commanded by names of the divine power - most commonly cabalistic and Hellenic 'barbarous names'. The magician uses wands, staves, incense and fire, daggers and complex diagrams drawn on parchment or upon the ground. In some magical systems, spirits are evoked into a crystal ball or mirror, in which a human volunteer (a 'seer') is expected to be able to see the spirit and hear its voice, passing the words on to the evoker. Sometimes such a seer might be an actual medium, speaking as the spirit, not just for it. In other cases the spirit might be 'housed' in a symbolic image, or conjuring into a diagram from which it cannot escape without the magician's permission.

While many later, corrupt and commercialised grimoires include elements of 'diabolism' and one (The Grand Grimoire) even offers a method for making a pact with the devil, in general the art of evocation of spirits is done entirely under the power of the divine. The magician gains authority among the spirits only by purity, worship and personal devotion and study. Evocation is just one technique in the kit of the western magician.

Important contributors to the concept of evocation include Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Francis Barrett, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, Franz Bardon, Kenneth Grant and Peter Carroll.