Hello, I haven’t used EA’s exact method but I can tell you what’s worked for me with visualization stuff. The short answer is that just following the instructions and regularly practicing the evocations will improve your abilities over time. It’s a long post but it should help.
You can find meditations out there where you visualize a specific shape or object or color or what-have-you with no intent other than to try and see the thing. I don’t think these are necessary. I visualize colors and forms as I fall asleep for my dream practice, but each of these visualizations has some symbolic meaning and intent behind it. You do have to actually do the thing you’re trying to get better at to improve the skill, but with magickal visualization you don’t need perfectly clear images for the magick to work. I didn’t see or hear any spirits for months when I first started doing magick and my rituals worked just fine.
Full evocation, where the spirit appears before you in a tangible form that you can see (and probably smell, feel, etc), is something I have not really dug into much, but I do have a good amount of experience seeing spirits and visions within my mind. This is much easier, and is the precursor to full evocation.
As a quick side note, I have done evocations (of both angels and demons) where I sensed the spirit arrive in the room with me, like an energetic, tactile presence, like wind blowing against your skin, even though I could not see them visually in the room. I would ask the spirit a question, and I would feel it sort of descend over me and speak to me, sometimes within my mind, sometimes out loud through my own voice. If you have difficulty with this, I learned by having a pencil and paper to hand and just writing down whatever came to mind during the evocation. Some of it (and at first probably most of it) will just be “noise” and random mind-babbling, but if you get into the flow of just writing you will receive messages from the spirit, and over time you will be able to clear your mind and recognize when something is just noise or when something real is coming through.
Ok a side note to the side note (this is why I started with the short answer) is that you can meditate on a visualization or an image on a piece of paper or something to build your concentration so you can do rituals with a clear, undistracted mind. Staring at a candle flame is a pretty well-known example. In some Tibetan traditions they gaze at the Tibetan syllable for “A” with different colored rings around it. In Japanese Shingon Buddhism they do this with the Sanskrit “A”. I use the Enochian “A” for my dream visualization because it is a symbol with significance to me. My preferred meditation object for concentration development, though, are the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nose, but you can use whatever you like and they all have their advantages. When you notice that your mind has wondered or that you are thinking about stuff, be glad that you noticed your distraction and return your attention to the meditation object, no matter how enticing the distraction may seem.
As a side note to the side note to the side note, in the past I have somewhat aggressively discouraged people from doing these sorts of visualizations because some people use them as a way of avoiding doing actual magick. Things like this and energy work are certainly useful, but they are not magick, I would say. What they do is help you improve your experience of magick. It doesn’t really matter how clearly you can picture something if you never actually do a ritual to cause change within yourself and the world.
Ok what was I talking about? Summoning spirits. My approach has usually been to imagine certain locations and scenes within my mind, which you will also hear called Pathworking, or sensory impressions that the spirit is said to have. I usually do not try to picture the spirit, but I do use this approach with servitors, whom I give a definite, consistent form (which they tend to alter). Any of this works, so I’ll elaborate a bit more.
I don’t know the exact details of EA’s method, but something you may find useful is to imagine a sort of “astral temple” that you travel to in your mind where you will call the spirit. This could be an actual temple, like a building, or it could be a quiet place in a forest, or an oasis in a desert, or the top of a mountain. Sit there for a bit and see what you can sense. What do you see? What sounds are present, what smells, what can you feel? There’s no right answer to this, there just is what you experience. If you are not attempting full evocation, but do intend to evoke the spirit into your space, you could imagine the spirit coming to this place in your mind as it comes to you physically in your ritual space. You may not see the spirit at all, and this is not a problem.
If you are attempting to see the spirit there in the room, then it may be more useful to simply imagine a white or black background out of which the spirit emerges so that you can focus on the body of the spirit rather than your surroundings. Again though I don’t know the exact details of EA’s method so I’d follow those instructions first. I know he often uses incense to act as a physical substance for the spirit to take form, but I don’t know what’s going on in his mind while this occurs.
These are good questions and are clearly more complicated than they may seem, which is why I’ve had to ramble on for a bit here about various things, but the short answer again is that just practicing the evocation ritual on a consistent basis will improve your skills over time. If you want to also do meditations or visualizations, you certainly can. I started with mindfulness meditation, then got into magick, and for a bit I did energy work. My visualization skills have naturally developed as I have practiced evocations and pathworkings to summon spirits. It’s like learning basketball. Yeah, if you can’t dribble the ball (focus your mind) then you should practice that, and there are different drills that are useful, but the whole point is to actually play the game. There is no glory in perfecting a practice drill, but there is glory in the game.
I really want to emphasize that you do not need to see, hear, or sense the spirit in any way for your magick to manifest the result you request (crafting magickal requests is a whole skill unto itself, by the way). I’ve seen all sorts of crazy visions and sensed pretty intense energies, and this is all quite fun, but even if this isn’t yet happening for you, magick will still respond to you. I’m doing mostly Enochian rituals nowadays, and some other mostly angelic stuff, and most often all I see in ritual is a bright light. Sometimes there’s these spooky tentacle things, and sometimes they show up outside of ritual, but what I mostly experience is an abstract but definite presence that is with me.
What I would say is more important to focus on first is your ability to communicate with the spirits. Initially this may feel like an email exchange. You send your message, you get something back. Sometimes it takes a few days or so. Sometimes you get it while in the ritual, sometimes while you are living your normal life. With practice it may come to feel more like a phone call. You still say your thing, then they say their thing, but the response is more immediate, like a natural conversation.
If you are persistent with magick, you may attain a state where the separation between your mind and the mind of the spirit blurs to the point where you could say that you are in a sort of permanent possession. You could also think of this as the limited, human ego mind dissolving and giving way for your omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God-mind to be your natural state of being. Personally, I’d say it’s really more like the human ego mind constantly cycles through birth, death, and rebirth while being suffused with the qualities of the God-mind. If that sounds weird and confusing, it’s because it is. Do the magick though and you will experience it for yourself.
