Jumping in to the Deep End

Hello to all who were lead to this post and have spared me their ear.

Here I pause to formulate a thought, realise how foolish it will sounds, filter. As the tip of my fingers touch the plastic of the keys I pull away yet again, filter more. Eventually give up and hope you are able to decipher some of the gibberish below, that might only make sense in my head.
If you’ve read so far, brownie points for you. :slight_smile:

Now, I am VERY new to all this, and by ‘VERY’ I mean, I’ve only read and not practiced, well, anything. Yet.
Unfortunately for my own mental well being I know exactly what I want and in a spectacularly stubborn fashion I push and shove. And to cut long story short - I wish to evoke Beleth.
I know exactly whom I want to speak to and what I want to speak about. From the first time I heard that name I had a moment of perfect clarity, this is it, this is who I need to channel.

See, the issue at hand is - I might be too eager and too straight forward jumping straight into speaking to a being, I personally, consider to be incredibly powerful, yet though I do have immense respect for Beleth, I don’t necessarily have fear of him, and I should.

The question is simple - am I too eager to go with what my gut tells me? As I’ve never performed ANY rituals before, should I start off somewhere else or for my first evocation choose a being meeting which might not have severe consequences?
I am fully aware that my question might and will sound incredibly silly for most, however should you find yourself willing to share any thoughts on this - I would be very grateful indeed.

Regards,
Ri

If you feel attracted to Beleth, I’d say trust your intuition to be honest - spirits (gods, demons, angels) all tend to favour and respect people who show a bit of backbone, know what they want and mean to have it, over mumbling insecurity and that false kind of humility that some people have (usually more in the white-light world).

I posted some general ideas for increasing the chance that your first evocation will be successful recently here and there might be some useful things to take from that. Other people might have useful ideas as well. :slight_smile:

Overall, I’d say proceed with confidence, be sensible and do some reading first (that Member Resources thread has a lot of info on basic banishing and other methods) - and then get stuck in!

The people who would shout that down are usually invested in a form of magick that’s closer to religion (i.e., it’s a method of getting in good with their God) or are religious, or didn’t listen to ANY cautions themselves and got burned, but it’s like baking a cake, sure you could burn your house down if you’re an idiot, but most of the time if you do a bit of research and see what experienced people are saying and doing to get success, you’ll be just fine. :slight_smile:

This is truly excellent advice and I am very grateful indeed. :slight_smile:

I was reading through a few posts from your suggested feeds as well as some other on this forum as well as a few others and I simply had to stop in the middle of a sentence of one of these posts and immediately prod a bit further, if I may.

I’m pretty sure I’ve already posted something incredibly similar fro what I’m about to say before, for which I do apologise, but that was personal opinion based and didn’t have a question in sight.
Now, for someone just starting to really read into it, especially if you’re knowledge hungry and you grab and chew every post to the bone - a lot of responses as well as initial posts seem very black and white.
What I mean is (just as an example about me reading on Beleth as it’s what sparked the thread) - there are many posts about performing a very specific, veeery detailed rituals when it comes to evocation. Goes something like ‘Middle of the day, red candles, sandalwood or very sweet incense, cigil made out of steel, wear a silver ring on the middle finger of the left hand and hold it to your face, hazel wand in the other hand’ and so on and so forth. And that is JUST the preparation, I’ve not gotten anywhere even close to the ritual itself ( :slight_smile: ), but you get the gist.
And then there are posts that go something like ‘just saying the Spirit’s name is enough, they hear their name, they know their name and they will seem you out. No ritual required, just place 4 white candles around you in a square, sit in the middle and have a chat with the spirit about how your day has been.’
I exaggerate about the topic of conversation, but again, that’s the gist of it.

Excuse my moment of vanity, as even though I’m a newbie I will attempt to lay out what I take away from that. *deep breath
Every encounter has a large amount of personalisation and improvisation attached. Perhaps we don’t choose the spirit, it chooses us in a way. And from then on it’s a gut feeling as the energy that is the spirit, demon, whatever else passes through us and dictates how to proceed.
But that’s my personal subjective opinion, and I probably am oh so very wrong :slight_smile:
But in a sense it makes a complete newbie confused.com, if you know what I mean.
It’s hard to distinguish fact VS fiction in the world where there might be a different truth for everyone when it comes to evocation.

If you are willing to share - when you started out, how certain were you as to what you were doing and what did you get influenced most by? Printed literature? Advice? Documentaries? Horror films (yes, I hear it’s a ‘thing’ when people turn to black magic after watching horror films and it makes me giggle)? Oh how exciting it would be to know. :slight_smile:

I was just replying to that earlier post you made :slight_smile: so I’ll copy my drafted reply below:

[quote=“Subject_Zero, post:16, topic:3571”]You see a lot of the articles and posts go something like 'Lay out what you want on the parchment in very clear text that leaves no loopholes. Chant the Spirits name (for Beleth in particular it’s a lot of ‘middle of the day, use red candles, he likes sandalwood incense, wear a silver ring on your middle finger and hold it to your face etc).’ In general VERY specific instructions and curiosly enough most of them end with ‘And then command the demon to step in the circle and command…’. Whoa whoa whoa! Control? Command? That can’t be right, there must be something more to it.

And then there’s the complete opposite posts that go something like ‘You don’t a complicated ritual. Just put 4 white candles around you in a square, because the energy within a square is more stable. Sit in the middle, relax and speak to the spirit telepathically. You don’t need to tell the Spirit what you want, they already know it, they can sense it. They will answer if what you offer them is sufficient. They have a sense of humour, no specific gifts required, just talk to them.’ And those posts usually end with ‘The demon is your mate and you will just have a laugh together and it do what you want it to because it is amused by you…’ Hold on! Whoa! That’s can’t be right either.

And if you just start reading about these things, reading both of those posts will absolutely confuse you![/quote]

There’s not necessarily a contradiction in these - I’ll try to draw a parallel using more well-known examples, also bear in mind this is just my opinion, but it’s honestly based on my experiences so far, fwiw. :slight_smile:

With human relationships, do you speak gently to your lover, give them space - or do you tangle your hand into their hair (or clothes), take the book from their hand, push them down on the bed, and devour them with kisses?

Both, sometimes, right?

We treat people completely differently depending on context, relationship, appropriateness, and what we want: some we act towards with formality, some we have to pull rank to plow through bureaucratic or other blockages, some we ask sweetly and hint we might wear the satin pussycat ears tonight, if they give us what we want… okay probably don’t try that last one with a scary hell-demon, but you get my point! ;D

Also, there are spirits like Belial who will actually respect you a lot more if you show a willingess to command them, rather than ask and plead, others (like a lot of people’s experiences with King Paimon on here) like to be addressed formally, even (in my experience) to the extent of you being dressed reasonably smartly, so they do all differ - and then some seem especially close to certain people, and have different requirements for them.

So long as they’re not jerking you around, I don’t see any harm in going along with that.

I think the mindset we have when we first approach spirits also counts, for example Belial attacked me as a “Hello” which made sense given that he was trying to discover if I was capable of commanding dark forces from my godself, since I came from more of a RHP background before, but he might take a completely different approach with someone else to see what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Coming to the point - what do you feel you can offer them? In my personal subjective opinion (and in no way I am claiming this is the only correct one), I believe your intuition is the thing to use. Should you really want to communicate with said Spirit, said Demon, said God and you can offer something of interest - the said entity will let you know what it is, if you listen, if you open up.

Yes, I agree, it’s always possible to ask them to send you a message you can both recognise (so you’re not left wondering if the 3 times you read “Sandalwood incense” today was from them) and understand - in other words, “Please make it clear”!

I think if you lean naturally towards this way of working (as opposed to ordering spirits around behind Judeo-Xian godnames) then this would be the best way, some people view the beings in the Goetia as evil demons, others (me included) see them more as complex spirits, even gods - beings who can be great allies and mentors, and who are not innately hostile or malevolent.

The intuitive approach obviously wouldn’t be so hot for someone who genuinely believes demons need to be kept under constraint, or they’ll drag him to hell, but for those of us who see them as spirits, it’s more reasonable.

Some people view them as archetypes of the mass subconscious (that’s my partner’s view), and Timothy Donaghue made an interesting post with a software comparison here - it seems to me that so long as your paradigm has internal logic, working it will be successful, and it’s only when people try to do something they aren’t confident in that they run into problems.

For example, I view them as personalities in their own right, so while it may sound bizarre that I offered Belial some half-eaten ice-cream one time, he seemed really happy with it, because it was quite a sacrifice - I don’t buy it often and I had been planning to eat it myself, so it was a genuine sacrificial act and not going out and buying something I wouldn’t have wanted for myself.

The idea to offer him that came from intuition, so that’s an example of how treating him as a spirit who may have preferences, wants and desires, was useful, instead of going by the book (so to speak).

If you are willing to share - when you started out, how certain were you as to what you were doing and what did you get influenced most by? Printed literature? Advice? Documentaries? Horror films (yes, I hear it's a 'thing' when people turn to black magic after watching horror films and it makes me giggle)? Oh how exciting it would be to know. :)

Me personally, I started speaking to spirits (as in classical gods that I read about, nature spirits, all sorts) when I was a kid, it was half a game because kids don’t have such a clingy grasp on “reality” and so on, and I also started soul-travel into various realms around then - at first I was ignored, later spirits began to interact, and my spells began to work.

That was heavily inspired by kids’ books with occult/folklore themes, mainly Moon Of Gomrath, the Dark Is Rising sequence, and then books on the classical gods, Celtic & British folklore, and The Golden Bough, stuff like that. I got into ancient Pan paperback horror novels, which were cheap, nasty, and usually sickeningly misogynist, but they had that vital theme of occult practice and paranormal experience, and I devoured Dennis Wheatley’s occult stories, stuff like that, and I was also inspired by horror movies, luckily my parents didn’t enforce a bedtime or anything!

Me taking this stuff seriously and trying to practice it was a secret all through my childhood, I had practically no friends anyway (sad but true!) and I knew my fam would freak out, I didn’t even know magick was a real thing people actually did, with real grimoires etc., so I had to pretty much carve my own path at first.

Lots of people here began young so it’s nothing special, and more people I suspect started young then got lectured out of it, or distracted by puberty, but I’m just old enough for there to have been no internet :o) so I had to make up my own methods for years, which was probably not a bad thing in most ways. :slight_smile:

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