So far we’ve talked about the steps that need to be taken before summoning a spirit. This week we’re going to explore a slightly different facet: when to stop.
One of the biggest objections to Solomonic conjuration among modern practitioners is its dominating tone. Threatening a spirit with hellfire and damnation unless it appears before you and does what you want just feels wrong to people raised in a post-enlightenment society. Why would we go to those lengths, the argument runs, when chanting or meditating on a spirit’s seal works just as well?
The question then becomes: does it work just as well? And in order to figure that out we need to decide what the actual goal of our conjuration is.
Fundamentally, the goal of a spirit conjuration is to establish some communication channel with a spirit. The challenge being that spirits in their natural state are wildly different from human beings, in both cognition and form. Bridging that gap enough for communication to occur is hard, and not all bridges are created equal.
We may only care about establishing a one-way link, where the spirit can get communication from us but cannot respond. This is often sufficient for something like a petition; we ask for a result, the spirit either grants this or it doesn’t. Case closed. But sometimes we want to establish a two-way link with a spirit. We want the spirit to be able to convey information to us in addition to getting information from us. Even in this case, there are differences on how the spirit shares information with us.
The easiest way to establish a spirit contact is mentally. With the spirit sharing words or thoughts into our own minds. For a contact like this, chanting and meditating on a spirits seal can be sufficient. The issue with these types of contact, however, is that they are most prone to pollution from your own mind.
Try an exercise briefly. Close your eyes and picture in your mind the spirit you would like to contact. Visualize them in the room with you. Speak to them, mentally or aloud, and hear in your mind what they say in response. They will probably respond. And when they do it will probably be in a voice and tone appropriate to them. Now do the same thing with a person you know well – a family member, friend, or a romantic partner. Now do the same thing with a fictional character. Chances are you will be able to easily have a mental conversation with all of them. This is (almost certainly) not a spirit contact, it’s just an imaginative exercise engaging the creative facilities of your own subconscious mind. After all, there was no preparation here. No meditation, no shift in consciousness.
Unless you are very closely in tune with your own thought patterns, it can be hard to differentiate a real-but-mental spirit contact from an illusion thrown up by your own subconscious mind. If you achieve mental contact with a spirit through a ritual, the result will almost certainly be a combination of both, some real spirit communication remixed by and filtered through the lens of your own mind. Mental spirit contact is the easiest to establish, but also the most unreliable.
On the other end of the spectrum are conjurations that seek a full sensory engagement with the spirit. The spirit appears before you in the room, visible to your eyes in the same way that physical objects are. You can hear it, you can smell it, you can (if you want) touch it. It can interact with other objects in the room (say, knocking over a cup of water). Conversing with the spirit is as straightforward as conversing with a person. Communication in this form is exceptionally clear; you are unlikely to mistake your own thoughts for the voice of the spirit. But such communication is incredibly hard to establish. A lot of the reason the Solomonic approach to conjuration feels extreme is because this is the standard that it was striving for. The process is extreme because the desired result is extreme. Breaking yourself and/or reality to the point where you can have a normal conversation with a non-physical being is hard.
Most conjuration (even Solomonic conjuration) falls somewhere in the middle. You aren’t trying to submerge yourself entirely into the spirit’s reality, or pull them entirely into your own. Some middle ground is achieved. One of the most common ways this is done is by scrying: including a darkly reflective surface – a crystal, a black mirror, water in a dark vessel or mixed with ink – in which the spirit can appear. It’s a physical focus to facilitate more subtle vision. Sometimes a triangle, a shape frequently associated with manifestation, is used as well. Some sources use both.1
Since it can be hard to switch between the active, commanding mode of a conjuror and the passive, receptive mode of a scryer, many grimoiric texts imply (more or less explicitly) two people working together: a magician to perform the conjuration and a scryer to perceive the spirit when it appears.2 If you are performing the ritual on your own, be aware that it takes a moment to shift gears, and allow a few minutes space in the ritual for this to occur.
Which brings us back to the question of when to stop conjuring a spirit. If the goal is a petition, or to establish a purely mental communication with the spirit, then you can stop pretty quickly. After a couple repetitions of a friendly conjuration prayer, you might notice a change in sensations of space. A growing sense of being watched or of not being alone, a sudden outbreak of gooseflesh, the atmosphere in the room feeling warmer or cooler or weightier. Even without any of these sensations, you can assume that the spirit is present but you aren’t sensing it, and proceed with the remainder of the ritual. In doing so, you can neatly sidestep most of the heavy-handed, oppressive tone of Solomonic rituals.
In contrast, if you’re attempting a full-on “physical” evocation of a spirit, you’re going to be at it a while. You should be mentally prepared for the ritual to last hours, with dozens of repetitions of various conjurations, threatening the spirit with increasingly dire and improbable punishments should it fail to appear.3
So there are a range of possible ritual outcomes that can be classed as “successful” spirit communication. Different outcomes will be suited to different purposes. You may gravitate towards one, or find yourself engaging in different modes at different points. Regardless, your desired end goal dramatically influences how you conjure a spirit and how long you continue before moving on with the ritual or giving up.
This post is part of a series on Solomonic magic. You can find the next post here.
- Pseudo-Trithemius’s The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals, for example, uses a crystal mounted inside a triangle that forms part of a “table of practice.” ↩︎
- Traditionally this latter role was filled by a young child, or in some cases a pregnant woman. ↩︎
- To what extent these conjurations are necessary to coerce the spirit into appearing (versus being necessary to psych yourself up to a point where you can perceive it) is left as an exercise for the reader to determine. ↩︎