In previous posts we’ve covered all the elements that go into summoning a spirit. We’ve now made it up to the penultimate stage in our Solomonic conjuration framework: Ligatio. In this phase, all the preliminaries are complete, the spirit has appeared, and the terms of the engagement (if any) have been set. The main thing left to do is communicate with the spirit now that it has appeared.
This phase is both very straightforward, and hard to prescribe any sort of process for. At this point in the ritual you leave behind the prepared script, and engage in a two-way dialog with the spirit. Like any dialog, it will evolve based on the interactions of the participants involved. If you conjured a spirit to carry out some task on your behalf, then this is the point to give them the details of your request. If you conjured the spirit to obtain some information, this is the point to ask for (and hopefully receive) that information. As we’ve established, conjuring a spirit is a lot of work; this is the place where that work pays off.
While there is not much of a script to follow here, there are a couple of points worth discussing. First the tone taken during the interaction, and second the use of offerings.
On the first point, that of tone, you see a wide range of recommendations. Classical grimoires primarily recommend that the magician take a forceful, commanding tone – ordering the spirits to carry out their desires swiftly, lest they face divine retribution. In contrast, some modern practitioners take the entirely opposite approach. In their view, since spirits are ancient and primordial consciousnesses, ordering them around like an errant butler is inappropriate. Instead they take a supplicatory tone, beseeching the spirit for aid if it deems them worthy. I find both these extremes somewhat distasteful.
My recommendation would be to match whatever tone you used for the conjurations themselves. If you performed a friendly conjuration requesting the spirit’s presence, then converse with it warmly and respectfully when it shows up. If your conjurations went full-on fire and brimstone, then it will seem natural to continue in a forceful and commanding tone. Treat it like you would an interaction with a potential business partner: be respectful but not meek, direct but not abrasive.
If you’re opting to interact with the spirit on more-or-less equal footing, you may choose to make the spirit an offering. Incense, food, and drink are traditional, but this can be anything that fits in well within your practice.1 You may choose to make an offering up front, as a thank you to the spirit for showing up; after the ritual completes as an advance on any work you’ve asked them to perform; or upon the successful completion of a request. Perhaps more than one of these are appropriate for a particular ritual.
If, however, you promise an offering at some point in the future or when certain conditions are met, you need to actually follow through on that. Not because there will be some dire outcome if you don’t (the spirit is unlikely to curse or punish you), but because paying your debts is good manners and shows that you are a reliable partner for future interactions. Nobody likes a flake.
This is one of several reasons it’s a good idea to be moderate in your offerings. It’s easy to overpromise – vowing to make offerings every week for the rest of your life, set up a permanent altar in their name, or perform particularly grueling acts of devotion. You’re much more likely to follow through on an inexpensive, one-time offering.
And nothing more is really needed. It’s tempting, when making offerings to spirits, to feel the need to provide “equivalent value.” If we are asking for a big, life-changing outcome, it feels appropriate to make a big, life-changing offering. But this presupposes spirits assign value in the same way we do. Spirits have a nature that is very different from ours, the ways they conceive of and interact with the world are not human ways. Something that may seem like a huge deal to us might be trivial to them, or vice versa. Start small, and build from there if it seems warranted.
It’s also worth noting that offerings should be mutually agreeable. You retain sovereignty in your own life. Sometimes a spirit will ask for something unreasonable, and you’re entitled to say no. You can counteroffer something more suitable, or just walk away from the interaction. Similarly, sometimes you will offer up something the spirit has absolutely no interest in. That’s also fine. Negotiation is a two-way street.
The Ligatio stage of the ritual is the culmination of what all our ritual preparation was working up to: a genuine interaction with a spirit. After all our preparations, prayers, and conjurations, the result is a conversation that is both mundane and transcendent. Because there is no script to follow, this is a stage that requires discernment. Discernment of the appropriate tone to take, the appropriate offerings to make, and how to evolve the conversation based on the responses you get. You’ve left the edge of the map, now you find your own way.
This post is part of a series on Solomonic magic. You can find the next post here.
- There’s an idea making the rounds that spirits experience food and drink through you, and therefore the appropriate way to make such offerings is to consume them yourself. This idea has only a tenuous historical basis. There are instances where cultures made shared offerings (offering a portion of communal food, or offering the blood of an animal and consuming the meat). There are also a few instances where food offered to a deity became hallowed, and was then consumed by clergy or congregation. But by and large, the spirit’s portion is their own. Making an offering and then consuming it is like having a dinner guest and then eating the food off their plate. ↩︎