Yes actually. The Sacred book of Abramelin the Mage mentions to the reader to not be so concerned about seeing a spirit and bringing it forth to physical materialization…but to focus only on getting the result that you want to get. In other words, if you get the evocation right, the spirit will hear you whether you are conscious of that fact or not. So to answer your other question:
“We” aren’t missing anything. This is largely a problem that you yourself have to figure out. If you search through the many results posted by people on this forum, you will see that in the vast majority of cases, the user did not report seeing any spirits during the rituals. As a matter of fact, one of my most recent results that I posted a few weeks ago where I got exactly what I asked for, I had to do an 11 day ritual to Nitika…and at no point during those 11 days did I see, hear or even feel the presence of a spirit…but I got the result I wanted nonetheless. Why? Because I don’t look for validations within my rituals in order to give me confidence in magick.
If I were to take a guess at what you are doing wrong, my guess is that you don’t actually believe in Magick. Just based on all the posts I’ve read from you, I get the feeling that you hope we are right about the reality of magick, but you don’t believe it yourself, which is why you sometimes go around questioning other peoples ability to perform magick:
When I see stuff like that, I view it as projection. The doubts in your own ability to perform magick, often gets projected on to the rest of us in your posts. The issue here goetic is that you will never get the validation you seek from other people. The experiences and results from other people can improve your confidence in magick, yes…but it can’t validate its reality to you. The only way to validate Magicks reality is to create your own proof. But you aren’t going to do this if you enter the ritual circle with a cloud of doubt around your head.
So my first bit of advice is to remove any sort of scrying mirrors or incenses from your rituals for the time being, so you don’t get discouraged each time when nothing appears. Instead, focus on the emotions required to manifest your reality. My second bit of advice is to pick one system and stick with it. If you have the Demons of Magick book by Gordon Winterfield, that’s a good one that seems to work well for beginners. And lastly, my third bit of advice: repetition repetition repetition. If you do a ritual for a particular request…repeat that same ritual several days in a row. I’ve been exploring this more lately myself, but I believe repeating rituals can be quite advantageous for two reasons:
- It creates a cumulative effect where your emotional investment is concerned
- It indirectly kill your lust for result by killing your desire to even think about the result (I recommend reading that hyperlinked article on lusting for results too)
This is something that I was informed is quite popular within New Avatar Power (NAP) But if you are going to do this, you need to set the amount of days you are going to repeat the ritual beforehand and stick to that decision, so that it doesn’t turn into a situation of you repeating rituals constantly in order to make up for your lack of confidence. For example, if you want to bring a love interest into your life…I would pick Asmoday, and use the system for petitioning Goetic spirits in the Demons of Magick book…and I would repeat the ritual at least three times. This was actually something told to me by an old but experienced user as a way of raising energy…if you aren’t able to sufficiently raise enough energy in one ritual (and he said that this was especially necessary for many Gallery of Magick workings). By the end of my 11 day ritual that I mentioned earlier…I was so happy to not have to do any more rituals for that particular request, because I had thought about it so much…it started to become stale in my mind…kinda like if you eat too much of one food for too long, you come to despise it, even if its your favorite meal. This is a good mentality to have after a ritual is over because it eliminates that all important lusting for results that some folks fall into.
So hopefully with this bit of advice, you can start getting the results that you’re after.