Belial’s test for me was to take over a dream - not a lucid dream - and attack me with entities of filth and disease to see what I’d do. I’d never worked with him before and he made damned sure I caught his name and saw that he was commanding these beings.
There was a lot of psycholgical stuff I hadn’t realised I carried, still, at that point (including the vague back-of-the-head belief “this MIGHT not be real”) and I had to kind of overcome it all in short order and command the dirty little buggers back down into the pit he’d opened up - I woke up at one point and the attack was ongoing, one of them had attached to my face and was pulling my face into a kind of rigid grimace that I was completely unable to fix using normal waking consciousness, and I had to go back into the dream and start kicking some ass.
I appear to have passed the test and he’s been part of my life ever since, and one of the few spirits I really trust (at least in specific areas) and also like, but that’s a bit off-topic - my point was that he threw me into a situation where I had to find and exercise that internal command over a large horde of beings, and while I’d mustered it before when I did a lot of healing work, that was usually with same vague idea I was serving some external value system than just my own desire to have things go a certain way.
I was also on a very RHP journey for quite a long time (I detailed that here if you’re interested) so most of my prior work had come through either desperation, when I was younger, or some vague feeling that there was something wrong with earth/the physical planes, and something wrong with me, and that I therefore only had a limited right to enact major changes on things.
Although I was working to leave that behind and had made a lot of progress, the hands-on demonstration he gave me was that I had the divinity within anyway to command darkness, and that in some circumstances, if I wanted to work heavily with demons and darker forces, I would need to locate that internal sovereign power and enact it with the same degree of wrath that any classical “angry god” could muster up.
If you give some consideration to what your personally feel you’re serving when you perform an evocation, that might be helpful: as far as I know the idea behind Solomonic magick is that certain demons wish to be returned to the state of grace that they had before they fell through rebelling against God, and that humans commanding them gives them a chance to earn that grace back since mankind is made in the image of God, and, when evocation is performed using Divine authority, that gives them a chance to earn back a little good credit (or whatever) through obedience to that name, and also that they will be compelled to tempt the magician to fall himself if he’s not careful enough (sorry if I generalised a bit there).
I don’t believe that myself, so for me to command demons on the basis I’m playing a role in their redemption and also aligned with that godform would make no sense, and also I don’t believe in making a pact in which I’m underneath the authority of, or wishing to gain the approval of, some higher being of darkness…
I am enough.
That, I think, is the difference between modern forms of evocation and especially (though not exclusively) the modern forms that are considered LHP, in contrast to the older methods where you have to get in good with a more powerful figure (God or the devil) who’s mostly considered external to yourself, and capable of denying you that right on moral or other grounds - for example, the instructions in some grimoires to be cleansed, celibate, avoid certain foods and so on before performing an evocation.
For this test I was asleep in bed (sleep is considered unclean and weak in some eastern RHP philosophies), slick with the night’s sweat still on me, with a smelly old dog sprawled at my feet, and had recently been eating meat, having sex, etc., and that was a far cry from the ascetic guidelines in a lot of grimoires, and yet those filthy little things were just as bound to compel when I realised what it would take to bind them.
Although I called on the goddess Isis for advice, she didn’t give anything to me, or initiate me like some benefactor handing out power or accreditation - she just reminded me, if anything, of the power that we all have, and it felt like remembering and not somehow being upgraded by someone else.
That’s why I believe in the power of modern forms of evocation in which you use your own innate godhood to command, and not that of some external force, anyway - sorry if my answer ran on but I wanted to give me opinions (and they’re only that, of course) some context by providing the experience that led me to be so certain of this ability, which lies within each of us if we just remember our true nature. 