Invocation
and Evocation

Inside Out

Principal among the operations of magick are invocation and evocation. Invocation is the act of drawing qualities or entities into you; evocation is the act of perceiving entities or qualities as external forms. Invocation rituals are often devotional. You go into the temple of the Goddess of Good Fortune and gaze upon her image and perform acts of worship in her honor so that something of good fortune may enter into your life. Some religions tell stories about their gods, sing songs, paint pictures, create stained-glass windows, and build cathedrals to imbue worshippers with godly feelings.

Evocation rituals are typified by the “summoning of spirits,” calling entities forth, external to the magician, so that the magician can communicate with the entity or induce it to go out into the world and perform various tasks. Better known systems of evocation include the Goetia, based on the Keys of Solomon,¹ and the practices associated with The Book of the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage.²

It’s pretty simple to remember: INvocation is the drawing IN of qualities or entities; Evocation is about relating to qualities or entities External to oneself. That’s where the simplicity ends, however. Hold on to your hat while your cognitive functions take a little ride though the ambiguity of consciousness. In general, most (if not all) of what we take for “the world” is a “user illusion,” a way that our brain interprets the world that allows us to experience clouds of probability (as physicists explain the nature of subatomic particles) as solid matter. We perceive the surface of our skin (however permeable and, ultimately, created of those clouds of probability and space) as the boundary between self and world. And we make numerous similarly illusory representations of everything we’ve ever seen, heard, felt, tasted, or smelled. Consider our experience of the world as a map or model that we create with our thoughts (and some help from the brain’s default network), based on the interpretation of our perception. Whether or not there is an objective reality to bump up against, all we can ever really do is experience our mind’s interpretation of bumping.³ And this model-making most certainly includes the delineation we make between ourselves and the rest of the world. What we consider to be internal and external may just be convenient distinctions that help us to maintain a sense of self and to navigate what we perceive of the world.

For practical purposes, we usually find that we need to take our internal representation as the world. So, for the time being, we can play within the usual rules and relate to our books or reading devices as solid objects, decide that we are something separate from the air we breathe, and treat as “unreal” only those things we recognize as figments of our imagination. Good with that? Are we still messing with ambiguity if we place imaginary objects or entities external to us or inside us? When invoking the Goddess of Good Fortune, we change our experience as if she has entered us, even though she probably only existed in our minds. When evoking the Goetic demon Barbas, we treat this highly imaginary entity as if it were a sentient creature external to us. It’s our experience, we get to define how we relate to it—one of the perks of being alive—and it is pretty much the same game we play, on an unconscious level, with just about everything else in our world that we decide is in us or outside us, real or not real, fun or not fun, woohoo or not woohoo.

All right, then. We’ll put the ambiguity of world-modeling and personal boundaries aside. For now, consider internal/external as a simple submodality distinction, one more way that our brain hangs a tag on perceptions to make them useful, to integrate them into our personal narrative, or to imbue experiences with woohoo.

Dr. Milton Erickson once said that hypnotic trance was the controlled use of “the same mental mechanisms that are operative spontaneously in everyday life.”⁴ The operations of magick are likewise operative in everyday life. Both invocation and evocation appear to be natural functions of human consciousness. If you have ever gazed at artwork, read a book, or listened to music in order to experience a particular emotion, mood, or feeling, you have performed an act of invocation. Did you have an imaginary friend when you were a child? Or do you ever imagine other people when you daydream? These are acts of evocation. Attributing sentience to otherwise inanimate objects can also be described as a form of evocation. What? You’ve never cursed at your computer or verbally encouraged your car?

Relating to our perceptual representations, whether internal or external, as sentient beings takes these naturally occurring behaviors and brings them up to their full, magical form. Even this happens spontaneously. Have you ever dreamed about someone you know? They may or may not behave exactly like the waking version of the person, but, nonetheless, dream characters seem sentient, self-motivated, and even unpredictable. This ability to create minds within our own consciousness appears to be based in neurology.

Monkeys and Mirror Neurons

A chance discovery in the late 1980s may have revealed part of how our minds conceive of entities. Three researchers at the University of Parma in Italy, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese, were studying hand movements in macaque monkeys. They had a monkey wired up with electrodes to measure brain activity in the inferior frontal cortex, paying close attention to an area of motor neurons that became active when the monkey was grabbing, pushing, picking things up, and so forth. When researcher Fogassi reached toward a bowl of fruit and picked up a banana, that area of monkey brain cells lit up, just as if the little fellow had reached for the fruit himself—but the monkey hadn’t actually moved a muscle! That is, just by observing someone reaching for a banana, the monkey was experiencing, for himself, what that would be like.⁵

The experiment was repeated by the original researchers and by others with similar results. More recently, experiments in humans confirmed that we, too, have a “mirror neuron system” that is activated in our brains when we observe other people.⁶ This means that, to some extent, it is possible to feel someone else’s pain (or joy or dyspepsia or satisfaction), walk a mile in their moccasins, or, literally, share a laugh. It also explains why we enjoy watching actors in movies and athletes in games—as we watch, our own brains are experiencing almost as if we were the character on the screen or the player on the field and we get to share in the emotion or exhilaration. Mirror neurons offer a clue to the phenomena of the contact high, why the designated driver giggles like an idiot along with everyone else, and why yawns are contagious. And perhaps we’ve also solved the mystery of why air guitar is so much fun.

The human brain, not surprisingly, is a lot more complex than that of the macaque. We won’t write off monkey complexity just yet, though. An experimental follow-up to the original fruit-grabbing routine placed a piece of cardboard between the monkey and the fruit bowl, blocking the view. When a researcher reached toward the fruit bowl, behind the cardboard, the monkey’s mirror neurons were still activated. The macaque had imagined the fruit theft and responded as if it had actually seen the crime in progress—which meant that it also felt as if it were swiping the banana itself. Imagination can activate mirror neurons, even in monkey brains.⁷

In humans, mirror neurons share space with areas of the brain responsible for language, as well as simple movements.⁸ Speech, sign language, and written language will all stimulate mirror neurons. It helps us to empathize with the speaker or writer. A great orator’s words can stir us to action; a novel’s narrator can feel like an old friend. Just as the monkey can imagine a hand grabbing a banana, we more complex humans can imagine fictional characters, imaginary friends, gods, demons, and memetic entities—and we can be moved by them.

We’ll refer to this process as Entity Modeling, the ability to recognize and represent qualities and states as entities. In 1950, early computer scientist Alan Turing speculated that machines could be said to achieve artificial intelligence if and when its communication could not be distinguished from a human. Turing proposed a test in which an interrogator sat before two terminals, a human communicating through one by typing and a computer through the other. If the interrogator could not tell the difference, the machine would then be considered an artificial intelligence. An intuitive Turing Test, if you will, performed by the mirror neurons, seems to immediately categorize things into “conscious entity” and “inanimate lump.” We look at each other and, hopefully, we recognize another human as both conscious and at least reasonably intelligent. Some very simple visual patterns, for instance, seem to fire off this sense of recognition—a smiley face, have-a-nice day symbol is recognizable to us as a human face; a South Park cartoon character can be identified with, at least for a half hour at a time, as a conscious entity with the ability to communicate, make decisions, and act, however stupidly, upon the world. Linguistic patterns also seem to have a similar ability. A sentence formed with proper syntax suggests that its writer or speaker possesses some measure of intelligence. Whereas a formed with sentence syntax that proper its suggests little or nothing. Based on such unconscious intuitions, we recognize writers as conscious entities when we read their well-formed sentences. We recognize other humans as such when we communicate with each other in text environments such as Internet forums. And we even recognize fictional characters as entities for whom we might predict behavior and sympathize. There are likely also many other behavioral patterns and cues that help us to, unconsciously, tell the difference between a conscious entity and a brick of cheese.

Symbols that represent entities affect our neurology similarly to the entities themselves. Just as the shape of a cartoon might tell us, in an obvious way, that the representation is intended to be an entity, the shape of an energy flow will tell us, perhaps on a more unconscious level, information about the entity it represents.

Evocation

Are we the same people all the time? Each state we pass through has its own kind of intelligence, its own kind of logic, its own reality tunnel. The quick snapshot of consciousness that we call a state can be thought of as an internal model of an entity, the person who you were then. The energy flow is a metaphoric representation of that entity. When we evoke an energy flow, externalizing it so that we can communicate with it, we refer to it as a state entity. State entities are rich sources of information about our lives and ready power sources for ritual and personal change.

Magical rituals of evocation range from the deep, mysterious and complex to the extremely simple. The following evocation techniques are about as simple as it gets, and offer you a chance to meet your state entities.

Exercise 3.1 Simple Evocations ⁹

Basic Positive Resource Entity

 

Banishing—Imagine a circle around you, where you sit. Take a deep breath. As you inhale, let your awareness fill the circle. As you exhale, let your awareness contract to as small a point as you can, in the center of your chest. After five or six cycles of this, take a really, really, really deep breath, filling the circle with your awareness, then exhale forcefully and fully, letting (or imagining) your breath sweep through your personal circle, chasing out anything contrary to your purpose.

 

Evocation—Identify something in your life that makes you feel very good in some way. It can be a feeling of confidence, intelligence, satisfaction, arousal, intoxication, approval, or whatever you might describe as a good feeling. Pay very careful attention to HOW it makes you feel, the structure of the feeling. Where does the feeling start? What kind of feeling is it? Where does it go as it develops? Does it continue to move? Is it static? Follow it through to its peak. Then decide “If this feeling had a color, what would it be?” Imagine the color (or colors) in your body in exactly the areas where the feeling is experienced. Then imagine that you are taking the colored shape out of your body and flip it around to face you. Place it on the floor outside your circle and breathe deeply, feeding it breath and energy on each exhalation.

 

Keep breathing and feeding it energy until it transforms. It may change shape, size, color, movement, or may take an entirely different form. Once it has transformed, imagine you are communicating with it. Ask it what it wants to be called. Ask it what it can teach you that it has never before revealed. Ask it how you can feel really good more often. Find out whatever you can from it. Thank it for everything.

 

You can also ask this entity if it has anything that it would like to do, away from your physical body, off in the external parts of consciousness. If it says that it does, then you can get an agreement of time from the entity—five minutes, an hour, a day, five years, or whatever is appropriate to the task—and the promise from the entity to return to your physical presence at that time. Note down the time of the entity’s return so that you can take notice when it occurs. Ask that your entity will choose to do this only if it is in your benefit and that it will be working on your behalf no matter where it is.

 

Closing—Absorb the entity, if it has remained with you, and anything else you may have created in your aura during this operation.

 

Repeat Banishing.

Transforming Negative Entities

 

Banishing—Imagine a circle around you, where you sit. Take a deep breath. As you inhale, let your awareness fill the circle. As you exhale, let your awareness contract to as small a point as you can, in the center of your chest. After five or six cycles of this, take a really, really, really deep breath, filling the circle with your awareness, and then exhale forcefully and fully, letting (or imagining) your breath sweep through your personal circle, chasing out anything contrary to your purpose.

 

Evocation—Identify something in your life that makes you feel bad in some way. This technique can be used even with major trauma. It is recommended, however, that you begin with less intense experiences until you develop proficiency. For your first time, think about something in your life that is mildly unpleasant. A situation with family members or coworkers that leaves you feeling annoyed, for instance.

 

Again, notice where the feeling flows in your body and mark it out with colors as you did for the good feeling in the “Basic Positive Resource Entity” exercise. Flip it around and place it outside the circle, in front of you, but this time trap it in a geometric shape of some kind, a triangle or square drawn (in your imagination) on the floor.

 

Keep breathing and feeding it energy until it transforms. Again, it may change shape, size, color, movement, or may take an entirely different form. Once it has transformed, imagine you are communicating with it. Ask it what it wants to be called. Ask it what it wants. Ask if there’s a way to accomplish that goal in a more pleasant manner. Negotiate. Find out what it can do for you that it hasn’t done before. Find out what you can do for it. Keep breathing to feed it energy. It may transform again if your negotiation is successful—in which case, flip it back around and draw it back into your body, in its original position. If it doesn’t change again, you have a couple of choices: 1) draw it back into yourself, but reversed from its original position; or 2) breathe and draw some energy from it with your inhalation until it has diminished somewhat, then reabsorb it back, flipped around to its original position.

 

Repeat Banishing.

So far, we’ve been communicating with our state entities pretty much as we find them. Remember that these are our own self-metaphors and that they can change and adapt as our imagination directs. It is possible to create entities that are targeted for very specific purposes. We will explore a number of ways to customize entities in the coming pages. Here is one way to create entities with simple evocation that may help us understand or resolve many different issues in our lives.

Exercise 3.2 Customizing an Entity

 

Banish.

 

Evoke a state entity either from a positive resource state or from a “bad feeling,” as above.

 

When the entity is outside your body, ask it what it would like to be called and what it wants.

 

Find the “purpose behind the purpose.” Take its response about what it wants and ask, “What do you get from that that is more important?” For instance, if the entity says it wants you to relax, you can ask, “What do you get from relaxation that is more important than relaxation?” And keep asking until the answers seem to reach a “highest level” of personal criteria. These often deal with overall mission, spirituality, or sense of identity. For instance, in response to “What do you get from relaxation?” the answer is “Good health,” you would ask “What do you get from good health that is more important than good health?” The answer might be “Ability to do your job.” “What do you get from the ability to do your job that is more important than the ability to do your job?” And so on, until you have reached the highest level of criteria that you can.¹⁰

 

Keep the state entity externalized where it is, and using the highest level response you got from it, create a second energy flow in yourself that represents that particular criteria, the best you can. Use a personal memory of that kind of experience or, if you can’t find a personal memory of your own, think about what it would feel like to be someone else who has that kind of experience. Identify the feeling, give it a color, etc.

 

Externalize the second energy flow and add it to the state entity that was previously evoked. Notice any changes that may happen.

 

Communicate with the entity and confirm that any changes that have happened will fit happily (or usefully) with your experience and your life.

 

Bring the combined/transformed entity back into your body as in the previous exercises.

 

Banish.

Sometimes you need multiple resources as you walk your path in life. Here is one way to literally line up a collection of resources and start to apply them to your future. Like the previous exercises, you can do this next one entirely in your imagination, but it can become much more powerful if you actually get up and move physically through the ritual.

Exercise 3.3 Walking Through States

 

Banish.

 

Using the above methods, create a series of different state entities that represent at least three resourceful states (states in which you feel good, powerful, creative, intelligent, strong, compassionate, patient, or similarly resourceful).

 

Place the entities in positions where they are separate from each other, but where you can easily walk through them with just a step or two in between each.

 

Select a situation in your life in which you could use some insight or new resources.

 

Think about that situation as you step successively into each state entity. Notice what different aspects of the situation come to mind in each different position. Notice what different kinds of thoughts you have about the situation in each different position. Leave each entity in its place as you step toward and into the next one.

 

Step out from all the entities and then absorb them back into you.

 

Banish.

This exercise also demonstrates how we can anchor states to physical positions or locations. A fun variation on Walking Through States might be to leave some of these state entities in various places where you will have to walk through them during the course of the day. You might find it useful to walk through the Wide Awake state entity on your way into the kitchen in the morning, or into a Focused and Professional state entity as you enter your office for a day of work, for instance.

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