This is a study of evocation of spirits. Summoning them to appear before the sorcerer/ess. This text hopes to explore modern translations of ancient grimmoires to look for consistency and uniqueness among the techniques therein, to develop a clear understanding of the method of spirit evocation.
One of the main purposes of building this website was to enable magic to reobtain a lost purity. These days commercialism as driven truth away. Books that feed the ego sell better than books that are honest about how hard it is to summon elementals or whatnot. Rituals which are easier to perform have sold well and sadly this has begun evolving magic towards what is fashionable, easy and popular rather than what was genuine.
While there are hundreds of pages which are focused on popular magic I hope to find a pure untampered thread that goes back over generations. After all, magic is often referred to as a “tradition” and things made up in the mid 90’s are hardly worthy of the term “traditional”.
In making these notes I am consulting the following:
The Picatrix – John Michael Greers and Christopher Warnock translation
The True Grimmoire – Jake Stratton Kent
Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic by Stephen Skinner
Techniques of Solomonic Magic by Stephen Skinner
The Book of Abramelin – Abraham of Worms Translated by Stephen Guth
Greek Magical Papyri – translated by Hans Dieter Betz
Suffumigation – The method most clear in the Picatrix is exposing something to uprising smoke. The Picatrix suggests that these techniques were born out of playing with fire and air, in which the Jinn are believed to live (or daemons).
A mixture of things with similar virtues – most things have correspondences to various heavenly bodies or constellations. The Picatrix writes about the attraction of spirits by combining items which all correspond to similar planets. The Picatrix even suggests eating only food that corresponds to the appropriate heavenly body leading up to the experiment. This would put the magician in a position of being corporeally consistent with the body.
The Paredros / Assistant Daemon – Many techniques involve the summoning of a regular helper spirit which always remains with the magician. This becomes familiar with the magician, something they can summon easily because they have a close connection with it. The spirit then becomes the means for communication and summoning things on the other side since it is hopefully second nature to that spirit. Examples of this include the spirit guide of mediums, the Holy Guardian Angel of thelemites and practitioners of the Abramelin ritual, Scirlin of the True Grimmoire, the crowning Orisha of Santeros, the spirit of the calling/trial of Syberian shamans and many more incidence.
This is summoned by words, offerrings and often placed with something taken from the body of the person who will work with the Paredros. For example in the Papyri Graecae Magicae the hair from all the head. In the True Grimmoire the sigil of the spirit is written with blood from the magician’s finger. This helps tie the assistant demon with the magician, I guess so it can be more easily summoned and communicated with.
The Name and Sigil of the Spirit – Often spirits are tied to their name and the sigil associated with them. Some magicians often say that the spirit actually is the symbol / name and there is no difference between the two. This is the common and consistent method of summoning spirits used in nearly every grimmoire I have opened.