Hello, I posted a short introduction in the introduction thread. I am new to ritual magick, specifically evocation, and am enticed to try it by the claims made of how powerful it is, and how swiftly results can manifest in the physical plane.
I am an extremely results oriented person myself, and do want this to work. I am having trouble formulating a very first task for an entity, as I feel that if this task is not completed, then to me, that will probably significantly mar the remainder of what would undoubtedly be a very short sojourn into the practical side of the occult. The trouble really is, that for me to truly believe this in the power of evocation, I would have to see a highly specific thing done, where the chance of it occurring on its own without “outside” intervention would be effectively zero.
An example would be a healing from some ailment that has plagued me for years, and is chronic with no relief. A permanent resolution of one of those things (theres several unfortunately) would convince me without a doubt of the power of evocation, and the specific spirit to which the request was given.
But Im hesitant to task an entity with that, perhaps from my own ignorance of not knowing if its appropriate to do that or not. What I guess I feel might be inappropriate, is while I do truly desire healing, my request would also absolutely be a sort of test as well. Theres just no other way, that I can see, for this first time evocation task to not be partially a test.
Again, I am ignorant. I question what the right protocol for asking a spirit for something is, and I wonder if the spirit will be offended, or not even show up, if my request is partially a test (but not in a disrespectful or challenging way at all; just in a completely impersonal “I dont know if this will work, and I need to see evidence of its efficacy” way).
So I post this here as a pure beginner for suggestions and advice on all of this.
I realize I didnt ask any questions… so here are some:
1: Ive read that even if you do not feel the spirit or cannot directly communicate with it, act as if it is present anyway. Based on that, I guess we are to assume the spirit is taking care of matters that it is tasked with taking care of. With that, how long is a reasonable amount of time to wait before concluding a failure, assuming the desired outcome does not manifest in a noticeable way?
2: Again assuming we are proceeding as if we can hear the spirit, but we do not, how long before another evocation should be done to re-ask the spirit the same thing, with the assumption that the prior evocation had failed due to evocator error?
3: In EE, EA says that the greatest advice of the greatest magicians is the evoke often. Can you evoke the same spirit over and over and ask the same thing without it getting annoyed? This is of course, assuming again, that one is not really able to garner from their senses that the spirit has actually accepted the task, and that the task has not been yet completed.
4: If a result does not manifest, but it is assumed that the spirit answered the calling, and heard a clear and specific request/demand/command/whatever, that is within that spirits realm of power to accomplish, what should be assumed to have happened, and how should one proceed from that point forward?
It can be difficult to believe in something you have no experience with as you don’t know what to expect from it. You must stop judging it however and simply give it a chance. This will open your mind up to possibilities and allow it to work for you. Nothing can work if you already expect it to fail, and all because you simply refuse to belief in something without a certificate of authenticity!
The real trouble is, people seem to think that magic has its own power source and therefore expect it to prove itself to them when in fact, it has to feed off the power from the magician as we are the supreme source, the spirit is just the interface that allows the energy to run towards the target (I truly hope you understand that bit).
Magic always works in my experience, it’s the operator who tends to short circuit the operation because they refuse to let it work for them by not understanding its nature? If you perform a ritual to summon a spirit then that spirit will always be there as they are naturally attracted to ritual operations. Apprentice magicians however may not have developed their senses yet to feel, see or hear the spirits and therefore assume their requests were ignored, which of cause makes them feel disappointed and the flow of energy is therefore severed. This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy as you can imagine and no results occur simply because you closed down the entire situation.
The apprentice needs to learn to open the ‘valve’ by not judging or analysing the situation as he performs ritual. He must learn to simply immerse himself in the situation and accept his surroundings without any critical thinking talking place. This will tend to keep your attention in the present and open the mind up without it drifting or analysing the proceedings.
By learning this art of ‘mindfulness’ you will be able to open up and start feeling a spiritual presence within your rituals, and then you can progress from there onwards to seeing them and conversing with them.
How long to wait for results and when should you repeat rituals?
Magic always follows the most easiest course at that moment in time so the chances are, you won’t see magnificent effects as it is far easier for spirits to put good ideas into your head to follow, or give you an opportunity to take instead, but most people don’t want to hear this truth and come into magic expecting the gates of hell to open and to see Satan himself walking through them with their request tastefully gift wrapped and placed into their lap?
One of the most powerful rituals in the black arts is the pact itself. This is where you agree to do whatever it takes to obtain your request and the spirit agrees to help you, in return they reap the energy of your success?
Imagine you came to me wanting help and I told you what to do and you did it. This would give you your wish and I would also feel good because you succeeded. I would therefore be feeding off your desires and success which of course, completes the contract. If on the other hand you never did as I told you and you just sat there waiting for prove of my existence than I would tell you to FUCK OFF!!
Please excuse my language and I don’t mean any disrespect to you as I was just letting you see what it’s like on the other side of the fence my friend.
As for your health problems, if you follow the flow as already mentioned above, then you will give yourself the best possible chance of healing your complaints. Sometimes however, the disease or ailment has sadly gone beyond repair but this doesn’t stop the spirits giving you better ways of dealing with your complaint…Take a look at those ‘Paralympic athletes’ and what they achieve with their so called problems?
BB44,If you work with a system,try to follow the patterns and do it as it is.Following the instructions of something that has worked for others is a good way to start.You’re using the same gates and the same current,and it’s safer than trying to contact an entity with your own way.
Your focus on results and not bullshit is excellent and I enthusiatically encourage you to stay with that, this is important and it’s what distinguishes magicians from airy-fairy mystics.
BUT, there’s a possibility that you’re setting the bar inordinately high, for your very first attempt at a new skill.
Imagine this was learning the violin, and you posted “If I can’t whizz out a flawless performce of Mozart’s sonatas on my very first attempt, I shall completely give up and assume all other violinists are frauds or deluded, and it’s all really done in CGI.”
See what I mean?
You’re trying to do a new type of task with - this is the important bit - new senses.
So I’m not trying to discourage you, I myself want everything on a plate by yesterday, magicians as a general rule are impatient people with a control-freak tendency, plus I get that you may have a degree of doubt about whether this crazy shit is real anyway, and actually, that’s something that affects all of us at times - even after seeing consistant results.
I’m going to go into some stuff that makes the first evocation less of a shot in the dark anyway, below.
The trouble really is, that for me to truly believe this in the power of evocation, I would have to see a highly specific thing done, where the chance of it occurring on its own without "outside" intervention would be effectively zero.
That’s something that probably even the most accomplished of us don’t find consistantly - sure, once in a while it happens, but most of us who consider ourselves successful and experienced find that we simply have consistant favourable “coincidences” - like we want a promotion, our boss burns his toast, gets off a to a bad day, and in a different state of mind realises the jackass he was about to promote isn’t worth it, whereas we are.
That sounds like nothing for one example, but when it happens again, and again, and again…
What you seem to be doing is kind of saying “I’'m going to learn a skill, but the skill is going to be what I insist it is and if it’s not, I won’t bother.”
And, I get it! I really do.
But consider you set out to become a doctor, and you said “But straight away I’m going to have immediate awareness of the correct diagnosis and treatment, where the chance of that coming to me through 3rd-party lab tests and scans is zero.”
People would think you were a loony!
Magick usually delivers through existing channels, it stretches probability but seldom totally overrides it, that’s why none of us (YET) are on YouTube manifesting solid gold bars or the 2-second cure for cancer from thin air.
As a general rule, the time between issuing the task and results appearing gets shorter and shorter as you become more powerful, to the extent it will sometimes appear right after the work, or even as you’re planning the work - this happens especially with curses, and with healing.
If a spirit is eager and has been waiting for you to work with them, they may be doing the astral equivalent of tapping their spirit fingers until you give them permission to set events into motion - this can happen, there’s enough in this post that I won’t speculate on reasons why though.
As for setting deadlines, it’s possible (this is theory and not some profound truth all magicians accept btw) that spirits exist with a fundamentally different relationship to space and time - for us, space simply IS - you put your coffee cup down 18 inches away and it’ll still be there 2 hours or 2 weeks later if no-one else moves it - but TIME “passes” - we can never recapture last weekend, it’s slid away forever - and we can’t quickly lean over 18 inches into next Tuesday either.
With spirits, they MAY be more like this: “the way time and space are perceived depends on the physical constitution of the perceiving cognitive agent (if made of mainly mass, then time flows and space is; if made of mainly energy, then space flows and time is).”
I posted the source, and more about that here - this is highly theoretical though as I said.
But it DOES account for how some of us have experienced chains of events beginning BEFORE we did a specific working, and ones which were sufficiently improbable, or exactly as detailed by the spirit (and not things we could have known about in any way) in such a way that we have solid reasons to believe they were initiated by the working we did.
Given this possibility of a different relationship to time, spirits will see chains of cause and effect more than clock time and calendar time, which means that a change in STATE of a physical object, such as specific astral events, sacrifice of some kind (a candle, incense, food) anchors the event in real space for them, because it anchors it in events affecting MASS (solid objects in a change of state at a specific point) and may be kind of more useful for demonic time-keeping.
I’ve used this with success (“Perform X by the time at which I burn this candle”) and using things like “The next full moon” or whatever also seems more useful than the kind of numeric time and date system that works for us.
This is a slightly different approach to paying the spirit with a sacrifice, but it’s worked pretty well for me, and making the sacrifice 1. at a date, and 2. conditional on the spirit delivering by that date is a similar way to mark where you need it done by. I have more on this, but it gets complicated so I’ll stop there.
If the outcome you want hasn’t arrived by the critical date, such as the yearly round of pay rises and you’re not on the payscale you want, then there’s a slim possibility that you’ll get another outcome, that’s better (maybe a competitor hires you on with better rates AND benefits) but generally that simply means your working failed.
For this reason, it’s best to 1. do divination, or have some done, ahead of the working on whether it will be successful - maybe that spirit doesn’t work well with you, maybe it doesn’t want to help, maybe what you’re asking is impossible for other reasons; 2. presuming you continue, work consistantly with spirits who deliver results - not excuses or (worst bullshit ever) “lessons” - and cut loose any that appear to just be jerking around.
There’s an oracle tool called The Book Of Fate that doesn’t require overt psychic skills, I posted a tutorial for that here and that link includes a legal download of the Book and my notes on how to adapt the questions.
I also detailed a method of getting Yes/No answers with Tarot here - that was devised by Mary K. Greer for the website tarot.com, and I’ve found the online version reliable for most things, and it’s also simpler than most Tarot spreads.
The number of variables in a situation tend to make divination about an event slightly less accurate (more chains of cause and effect to consider), but a divination on whether N. Spirit will be willing and able to perform a task is usually more reliable, since it’s asking a more simple question, with less C&E to affect it in general.
In the specific instance of needing something by a set date, do divination on whether the spirit you’ve chosen is willing and able, bring the emotion and imagery of the outcome to the spirit during divination, anchor it in time with a conditional sacrifice of some kind, ideally involving a change of state of something - incense, candle, or food or liquor - which they will not receive if they don’t give you what you want.
2: Again assuming we are proceeding as if we can hear the spirit, but we do not, how long before another evocation should be done to re-ask the spirit the same thing, with the assumption that the prior evocation had failed due to evocator error?
Generally, no, this is why you should ideally do divination ahead, especially if it’s a pass-or-fail deadline event that you need by a specific date.
Repeating yourself to them may appear insulting and worse than that, if you believe you’re able to repeat, you might not bring the same depth of emotion to the initial working, and giving something 100% is usually the best way to get results.
3: In EE, EA says that the greatest advice of the greatest magicians is the evoke often. Can you evoke the same spirit over and over and ask the same thing without it getting annoyed? This is of course, assuming again, that one is not really able to garner from their senses that the spirit has actually accepted the task, and that the task has not been yet completed.
MOST of the spirits I work with would find this bizarre verging on redundant, or insulting, and I’m a really obsessive over-thinking kind of person so the ones who I work with most KNOW I do this occasionally, but they make it clear that it’s not ideal, they just tolerate me because I honestly can’t help the way my mind works, and being like this has other uses, and is sometimes a strength.
“Evoke often” applies more to evoking spirits for things in general, not the same one for the same task.
This means you develop power and senses, develop good bondsa of trust and even affection with the spirits who have helped you the most, and generally seems to work.
I can’t find the link now, but I was researching pages on the Holy Guardian Angel concepot for someone and found an excellent essay stating that the core initiatory act in almost all traditions was the point at which the magicians acquires a bond to a spirit that’s intense and lifelong, whether conceptualised as HGA, guardian demon, whatever.
IMO most beginner and intermediate magicians should make seeking that spirit a high priority, it could be a god, demon, angel, or any other type, but I’m wandering a bit off-topic there so shall zip it!
4: If a result does not manifest, but it is assumed that the spirit answered the calling, and heard a clear and specific request/demand/command/whatever, that is within that spirits realm of power to accomplish, what should be assumed to have happened, and how should one proceed from that point forward?
Firstly, call them up again and ask what went wrong - sometimes this just happens.
There’s a great post by E.A. detailing this kind of situation here.
If you can’t, yet, communicate well enough to do that, then you can use Tarot for this, again you’re going to have to be learning this skill as you go along, and/or ask the spirit to send you a signal in some form you can recognise, and understand.
What you’d do next depends on the details, I guess - did you use a spirit who’s known for liking that kind of work, did you do divination beforehand, and afetrwards - what did they say - etc.
Okay sorry this is long, I’m trying to explain my answers, and what I understand of the factors involved, instead of trying to give you definitive stuff that would probably not be useful, I totally understand you want results and not waffle (and that’s a critically important mindset to have) but I also wanted to bring up some areas where things might not go exactly as you specified in your first post.
Don’t ya just love it when this happens? It never fails to impress and amuse me at the same time.
Many times I’ve had guidance from the spirit before I’ve even asked the question and sometimes the spirit has put blocks of information directly into my subconscious and I have had to look at it later to analyse its meaning? You know when this happens as it tends to give you information which makes no sense at the time of asking, it will either come through as some garbled collection of words or your mind will tend to stop and hit a blank even though you know you just received something. I Just write it down and don’t stop to think about it within the ritual as this can kill the momentum.
Those fragments can be carefully thought about later in a conscious state of mind. It is at this stage that you will get led into a line of thought where the answer is lurking (This will then explain the garbled language, or that block of information which was placed deep in your mind at the ritual).
As for the time factor, I get the impression that these deviations and fluctuations in time are caused through our world and the spirit realm colliding, which can cause time to become unsynchronised for a while as the two spheres try to come together. This will explain why you can receive information before you even ask! These informalities of time can even have you obtaining information long before you’ve had a chance to formulate the question?
Irregularities like this (as mentioned above) can also happen with our intentions as I have experienced the outcome before I have even done the ritual! Although the spiritual realm and the physical world are side by side, the element of time itself can totally misbehave itself when the magician tries to connect up?
These are wonderful but strange occurrences that can happen frequently until our minds fall into alignment with the spiritual realm, and then we can have conversations in real time without telepathy, or without any more of these ‘wonderful nuisances’ occurring.
Sorry for waffling on here and I know It’s off topic but this just came into my head with Eva mentioning this within the post above. These fluctuations in time have happened to me twice this year. One of them was funnily enough to do with PROCRASTINATION!
“Can you belief the fuckin contradictory aspect of this situation lol!”…I really think the spirits are having a joke at times?
Thanks for the answers all, Ive read them fully and they have been helpful in me getting a better handle on the situation as a whole.
Lady Eva, thanks for the video suggestions, Ive watched them both. Ive been watching through all his videos actually for about the past month now.
I can't find the link now, but I was researching pages on the Holy Guardian Angel concepot for someone and found an excellent essay stating that the core initiatory act in almost all traditions was the point at which the magicians acquires a bond to a spirit that's intense and lifelong, whether conceptualised as HGA, guardian demon, whatever.
IMO most beginner and intermediate magicians should make seeking that spirit a high priority
I just posted some stuff about belief (or at least, sincere suspension of disbelief) as an element of magick, it might be something to consider as well as you approach your first bit of work: #msg73037.
Thanks for the link. I do believe this is possible, and does work for people. Of the existence of magick, I am not doubtful.
What Ive been working on for several years now, is believing that things can change for me. Ive been stuck in an inertial wave of consistency in terms of rate of change of various aspects of my life, for some time now. As an example, the rate of change for some aspects of my health remains in a consistent downwards trend. I want to break this inertial downward flow though, and I do have a positive outlook on being able to do this, something Ive also had to work on for a long time.
Of the twin giants of fear and doubt, fear is caged for me. Doubt, while weakened, I am still wrestling with, but believe I do have the upper hand.
It puts up a great struggle, though. Self-doubt, eh? Its a tough one.
Cant help but feel almost certain its tenacity is strictly due to a christian (catholic) upbringing, too. I imagine many of us here were brought up in that paradigm…
Then faith in yourself is perhaps your key - Nap Hill talks about this a lot, one of his books starts off inviting you to meet “the most important lving person” (a daunting concept for many people who pick up his books because of problems with self-doubt or low levels of self-esteem) and of course, that turns out to be YOU.
So, suspend disbelief in yourself perhaps? At least for the duration of this work, because dating back to ancient Egyptian times, the magician is invited to associate himself with God, or gods, by assuming their authority, then that was carried on into traditional grimoire evocation in which the mage acts in the authority of God, and finds a new expression in modern methods where you use the concept of innate divinity of the self.
[quote=“Lady Eva, post:11, topic:6429”]Then faith in yourself is perhaps your key - Nap Hill talks about this a lot, one of his books starts off inviting you to meet “the most important lving person” (a daunting concept for many people who pick up his books because of problems with self-doubt or low levels of self-esteem) and of course, that turns out to be YOU.
So, suspend disbelief in yourself perhaps? At least for the duration of this work, because dating back to ancient Egyptian times, the magician is invited to associate himself with God, or gods, by assuming their authority, then that was carried on into traditional grimoire evocation in which the mage acts in the authority of God, and finds a new expression in modern methods where you use the concept of innate divinity of the self.[/quote]
That is brilliant advice. So simple but I probably would not have thought of it. Probably just what I needed. Thanks!
Some people seem to have deep connections to certain spirits, such that when they finally seek the spirit out through evocation or soul-travel, the spirit gives the impression (or even says in as many words) that they’ve been waiting for us all our lives, have been with us all our lives, etc.
This could be due to past life inheritances (I’m not trying to “sell you” on the theory of reincarnation, but some people at least do seem to have these), it could be genetic inheritance (that seems more and more important in magick, as Buné is showing me), and this includes blood relatives who are not direct ancestors.
It could possibly be a “backwards effect” ref: the time-related stuff I outlined above, where time to at least some spirits isn’t strictly linear and uni-directional, so once they’re called, they will always have been present, and always will be. That even does my head in though, and I usually like this kind of stuff!
There also seems to be a legacy of spiritual inheritance, for which my best guess is incarnations outside the family you’re now in, etc. - this could explain how (for example) a magician with African ancestry can find himself working, powerfully, with Chinese spirits or paradigms.
I used to do a lot of healing (I was trying to save the world - now, I just plan to take it over! ;D) and during those, even the most mundane people, who hadn’t even sought my help but a relative or friend did on their behalf, would have the most amazingly complex spiritual “courts” of ancestors, unnamed spirits, even well-known gods and, I suspect, demons, though the paradigm I worked with didn’t recognise the exact concept of demons, such as those listed in the grimoires.
These spirits protect the person to a large degree, though they’re seldom able to over-rule the person’s free will, and even animals appear to have something similar - animals also have, in my direct and repeated experience, a Higher Self as complex as that of any human.
I can attest to this being more than imaginary because the HS of animals I’ve owned have told me things that were going to happen with the animal in future, that have turned out to be correct and which I couldn’t have knopwn. That to me counts as proof, when it’s consistent and reliable.
So, given that even the most non-magickally minded people are walking round with a veritable committee of spirit watchers (there’s a thought next time you’re on the lav!), many of whom are heavily invested in that person’s well-being, when someone decides to take up magick, these various spirits may be among the first they contact, or they may even find that after a few evocations or other workings where they chose the spirit, spirits contact them out of the blue.
Another slightly more controversial (and far more volatile) event is when some people are told they are the son/daughter, or an avatar of, a well-known spirit.
This not only happens to people a lot, it’s also something I’ve been told by spirits about various people, including (again) reasonably non-magickal types, though it’s slightly more common with people like us.
And it’s been told to me in cases where I had absolutely no conscious attachment to that person, and there was no gain for me in telling them this (by which I mean, nothing that may have prompted my subconscious to throw me a false idea based on wishful thinking) - in fact, usually it’s been a serious moral dilemma of whether to pass it along, since it can be pretty destabilising for someone to hear something like this, especially if they contacted me for healing and are having some kind of crisis.
While it’s no small thing for a spirit to tell you this, and you shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand (of course, you need to be in a position where you’re getting enough results to prove you’re doing magick, and not just daydreaming, before you can invest too much confidence in the accuracy of ANY information), it can be such a sanity-destroyer for a lot of people that it’s important to not overreact.
My advice to anyone reasonably new to magick, and to whom this happens, is to file it away in a “kitty box” (definition) and not make dwelling on it a major part of your life, unless the spirit in question asks you to call the information up for ritual purposes.
Thank them, be polite, maybe even use that information when you do magickal rituals of certain types, but don’t let it eat you up - aside from anything else, it’s actually reasonably common, so there’s no need to feel “special” or singled out by it.
I may be leaning very conservative there but I’ve seen too much misery from this type of thing completely dominating a person’s mental and spiritual life, and spirits, especially demonic ones, tend to operate in a very intense manner so may not be aware that their enthusiastically given information is driving someone to an unhealthy level of obsession, if you’re in the mood for more Eva-novels :o) I posted my present understanding about why that is, here - “Psychology Of Demons”.
So, anyway, most people do have a range of spirits looking out for them, some people potentially have something far more intense as well - I’ve debated for a while making a really simple divination tool to help people discover which spirits they’ll work with best, and which (if any) are actually eagerly waiting for the call, but most standard tools can be used in this manner anyway, for example there are astrological correlations to Tarot cards that can be found online, and that might indicate whether a person will do better with Mercurial, Solar, or Saturnian spirits, etc., and you can also use standard readings to divine on whether the gods from a certain pantheon will be favourable, and the kind of stuff I mentioned above as well, like Y/N Tarot & Book Of Fate.
So anyway, that’s what I have on it - with some notable exceptions, it seems like spirits can’t directly contact a person who’s not involved in magick or deeply not interested in the paradigm or current that spirit’s most connected to, but later, as we move into magick (or into a new paradigm or working method) they’re more likely to make their presence felt without an overt invitation, as Belial did with me for example.
Prior to that they may send hints, or you may just feel an overall attraction to certain beings, and that’s something to always be aware of and on the lookout for - hearing a spirit’s name in your head, or words that sound like the name, is another reasonably common thing, words getting stuck like when you have a song “on the brain” for example.
Thanks for the detailed answers Lady Eva. The depth is much appreciated.
You dont have to sell me on past lives either. I find the theory of getting just one life and thats it, incredibly implausible for more than one reason, not least due to the fact I believe Ive had glimpses (and one extremely powerful reliving in a dream of the death in my last life during WWII) of several of them throughout history. I feel like I can see my progression more or less through time, through several different civilizations.
And Im so glad to see someone think as well that non-human animals also have what human animals do too, that being, to choose a word to encapsulate all that metaphysical stuff, a “soul”. Only in mans hubris is he intrinsically superior to the other animals… although certainly some will disagree with that.
