This is a working I did shortly after joining this forum, which has been immensely empowering and significant.
It’s a 2-part post, but the core lends itself to a very neat “tl;dr” synopsis!
The basics are these: there’s a pre-supposition that you have a being called your Personal Daemon, which my source (Magic: History, Theory, Practice, by Ernst Schertel – I’m going to call it “the book” from here on in) maintains is the divine/demonic magickal and powerful part of you, and which can be called forth to appear in a figure you find supremely erotically attractive, in order to commune with it, gain power and knowledge, and so on.
You structure the figure, then breathe the Daemon out through your pores, until you sense and see it take on a life of its own.
The book kind of ends there, because much of the context and groundwork was covered earlier on, and anyway contains no concepts that should be new to anyone here.
Finally, I’ve pasted the text from the book that relates to this here in this image, it’s a short excerpt gleaned from a few different pages for anyone who wants to take this study further from the raw source.
If you don’t care to read any more, you’ll now know as much as I did at the start and will be able to try it out.
This Daemon exercise towards the back is in the Practice part, having already discussed the History and Theory of magick as the author understands them.
If you want to come further down the rabbit-hole with me, this is my account of the working to date:
Prep
My intention was to end once and for all the “Parent/Child” dynamic innate to our relationship to our Higher Self (HS), and when I use that term I’m talking about the concept found primarily in core shamanism, in which the HS is a kind of all-wise level of the self which steers you through various life “lessons” etc.
The HS in that paradigm always, when followed to its final logical conclusion, leads to a traditional Right-Hand Path goal of renunciation of the material world, via shedding all attachments, and the ultimate return of your united self to merger with the Source.
This is not my goal, however, so I wanted to alter my relationship with the more powerful levels of my soul to one more fitting to my aspirations.
It’s my theory that this level of the soul is a form of spiritual placenta between the Source and the individual being, and that it’ll present itself to you in different ways depending on the paradigm you use to approach it, and your core beliefs and goals, and that it has no innate drive or form, but simply mirrors your beliefs about the nature and purpose of reality.
By way of preparation, I did plenty of reading on the concept of the “personal daemon” in ancient thought, and also refreshed my understanding of the Higher Self by re-reading some of my old white-light books that discussed that.
Choosing My Daemon
The book describes the use of the image of someone to “whom we are bound by any kind of strong emotions – at best passionate love” and also suggests that for best results, “choose a human as the starting point for the imagination, who already in life also activates our demonic sides. It is not by chance that many of the old masters took their ladylove as a model for their holy pictures.”
I chose a man, an actor, who I find incredibly attractive in his younger years, who’s now deceased after a long and happy life - this was because I was advised against the use of a living person by my own spiritual allies. The book touches on this, saying concern about using a living human is a myth, but I was advised to do it this way.
He was in any event my first choice, I’m not going to name the person (he’s got living adult children and I would hate for them to read this) but he’s just about my most perfect archetype of a male figure, and someone whose outward form felt like an appropriate form and mask for my Daemon.
There were three other reasons for choosing a male image: firstly, I already have an exercise for the creation of a Magickal Self from Thorsson’s book The Nine Doors Of Midgard, and in that exercise you call forth your empowered self and step into it, operating as one being. To add another female magickal identity to the mix seemed redundant.
Secondly, as I discussed here, I’m interested in the way we bring all our natural psychological architecture to every working we do, and I wanted the ability to possess and gain power from every last bit of baggage and cathexis attached to masculinity, without departing from my own feminine identity – in fact, I saw it as an opportunity to explore that even further, and so it turned out to be.
Thirdly, I wanted to make full use of the energetic (for want of a better word) differences between the masculine and feminine described in The Kybalion, in which the masculine is considered the force that can only act through the feminine; the masculine is the principle of Being, the feminine is the principle of Becoming; the masculine is the willed force, and the feminine the receptive force upon which it acts to create anything. I’ve tested these concepts out in different areas with magick, and had found them reliable.
The Kybalion states that “The office of gender is solely that of creating, producing, generating” which was also well matched to my purposes – the generation of a godself whilst still alive.
This promised the opportunity to become a being complete, with both genders represented, and yet able to interact in that dynamic creative tension, instead of merging into a neutral status in which polarity was collapsed.
Structuring
I found a suitable face-on portrait of my object of desire (I’ll call him Mr X. for the purposes of this post) in which he appears to be looking directly at the viewer, and printed that out onto A5 size glossy photo paper. I also laminated the image to prevent the distraction of fingermarks or creases.
I’d expanded on the text in the book by intending to charge, first, a photographic image (the book mentions artists charging their painted works in such a way) which I could use as an evocation base for my Daemon, instead of just using magickal imagination.
I already had experience using images as bases, and those images have always “come alive” for me during evocation, in the same way that the book described the image of the Daemon as developing “an almost eerie-holy expression.”
Another thing of note is that I chose to use a black and white image, because I have almost everything Mr X. did on DVD and I felt the small difference would be helpful.
After doing some basic prep (my Invocation of Inner Divine), and cleansing the printed image of any links to the real Mr X., then dedicating it to myself and my Daemon, I sat relaxed in our Temple holding the image between my hands.
Following the advice from the book, I used my magickal imagination to sense the power I’d raised during the Invocation radiating firstly from my very pores, and then began “breathing down” my Higher Self from my Sahasrara chakra, though my body, and into the printed image. I was steadily reciting “Come forth, my Personal Daemon, come forth into this image” as I did so.
It got very satisfactorily strange after just a few minutes of focused breathing and summoning – the image’s eyes appeared to take on a slight life, in a way that’s only happened before when I evoked a real entity into an image or statue. They stopped being a black and white image and became something looking out at me, through the printed form of a man.
At this point I was also channelling an almost adoring level of worshipful love into the image, the kind that you probably feel for a real partner for about 3 seconds during the “honeymoon period” before the flaws start to show.
I learned to channel love as part of my training to become a healer, it’s a powerful force that can be drawn directly through the heart chakra from Source – but in this case, I made sure to keep my awareness very much on an erotic level rather than the unconditional type used for healing.
The image increasingly took on the quality of a living, aware being, with a ghostly light similar to the aurora borealis playing across it, and once it felt as charged as possible, I opened up telepathic communication.
During the first session, I asked the spirit to describe himself, and he confirmed he was my Daemon, and ID’d himself by signing a name I was given by one of the spirits I’m in a pact with as his own.
He also gave me a unique name for himself, and confirmed that I had begun the process of calling forth my Daemon into external form.
After that, the contact faded, and I was also extremely tired mentally, so I bade him to return from whence he came, closed the contact, and placed the image on my devotional altar.
Build-Up
In the following weeks I called upon my Daemon through the image almost daily, usually after breakfast when I had some peace and time alone to connect with him.
I would hold the image at a comfortable distance and call him by the name he gave me (which I verified with divination and also with my spirit allies), “N, N, N, my Personal Daemon, come forth” and at the start of the summoning, the image would change in intensity, with visible flickering in the eyes.
It became my habit to consult with him on reasonably minor matters, the type of things I wouldn’t evoke any other being for help with, and he gave me some very good advice on a couple of occasions when I had a choice to make and wasn’t sure which option to take. I never used any kind of circle/triangle set-up to evoke him, since if he was to be useful he needed to become a part of my life without recourse to props or any physical base outside the two consecrated photographs.
I only called him forth through the photo, and a week or so in, I found a better quality image that printed out A4 size with photographic crispness, still in back and white, and made that my main evocation base for the Daemon in our bedroom, keeping the smaller one at my desk. My partner believes all entities are aspects of the shared unconscious anyway, so luckily this didn’t bother him!
After the first two weeks, my Daemon independently took on the habit of manifesting outside the images, once called through them, in the form of Mr X., and in the first week of December he was manifested to clairvoyantly visible presence and standing beside me (I was on the internet) when he wanted to interrupt my train of thought – and he did so by touching my neck, running his finger down it to get my attention (it worked).
Like all spirits I’ve touched to date, he doesn’t feel like living flesh, with friction and moisture and heat, he feels more like a statue come to life.
This was pretty remarkable since I hadn’t actually done anything to call forth this increased ability, this wasn’t a full–on evocation with incense or any props, and that he was able to touch me to get my attention verified for me that he’s fully developed as a self-aware being and not “just” an egregore that runs off my imagination.
Cont’d >
