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Video Description
What does it actually mean to summon a demon? In this conversation, Lyam Christopher clears away the horror-movie picture and offers something far more surprising. A demon, in his telling, is not a monster from a fiery pit but a manifestation of old trauma, a pattern of fear or craving that moves through us without our permission. To conjure it is not to command a servant; it is to call that hidden thing into a form we can finally see and speak with.
He turns to Edgar Allan Poe as an example. In The Raven, a grieving man watches a lonely spirit appear in the shape of a black bird and speaks with it, but never frees himself, and so the bird remains. The proper work has three questions: what do you want, what do you really need, and how will you feel when you receive it? Then the astonishing part, instead of banishing or fighting the creature, the magician feeds it. A flowing nectar of what it truly needs rises from the earth and pours through the heart, until the old pain loosens and changes form.
The real shock is gentler and deeper than any jumpscare. As the demon dissolves, so does the one who rose to meet it. The self that is made of grievances and fears can melt away too, leaving only a calm persona behind. That is why this work is called frightening, not because of spirits, but because it asks us to release the story of who we have been. The full map of that patient, careful path is laid out in Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation, where daily ritual and journaling prepare the ground long before any deliberate summoning begins.
Full Video Transcript
Okay, kids, this is the autumn equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s the spring equinox in the Southern Hemisphere. To Golden Dawn magicians, the equinoxes and the solstices were sort of like holidays. And I think the equinoxes were particularly important, mainly because of the balance between light and dark.
And so in the Golden Dawn system of magic, balance of supposedly opposing forces is very important, mainly for manifestation.
And many people who do sort of magic exoterically would say that the spring equinox is a great time for bringing things into manifestation.
And maybe the autumnal equinox is a great time for making things disappear from manifestations.
uh not really no the best time uh symbolically speaking both of those times are good for bringing
things into manifestation okay so this whole idea of like um polarity things are coming out and then
things are going away again we know that sort of happens uh but what’s really happening is that
things arise into appearance and then play themselves out and then dissipate so there’s
not really a coming out and going back in. So the sun comes out of hibernation and then goes
back into hibernation for the winter. No, manifestation is always happening. And when
there is a balance between light and dark, supposedly then the duality of existence
makes things clearer and it makes things easier to manifest. This is important for this video today
because we are talking about if i can make it come up here on the slide how to conjure demons
and so if you’re conjuring a demon having it materialize or materialize or come to some kind
of visible visible appearance it’s helpful to have a sort of equilibrium between light and darkness
okay and for our purposes here that’s more like a separation between inside the magic circle and
outside the magic circle okay and this whole idea of demons arising and appearing and then playing
out their little dramas and then dissipating okay this is that’s important for how this process
works okay what so in um in the sort of um exoteric or in the you know vulgar way of looking
at demon summoning uh you conjure spirits and then you dominate them and subjugate them to the
will of god and you put them to work in tasks uh to serve you um so that’s a misunderstanding
okay so that is the um that is the exoteric view of uh magic uh and it is propagated by those who
do not understand what is actually happening okay but it is interesting to say um or it’s
interesting to ask the question uh this is done a lot now in sort of new age circles actually
they’ll say is is that behavior serving you any longer in other words or is that thing that you
subscribe to is does that serve you or so remove the things from your life that no longer serve you
okay so when they do this they’re basically talking about the original meaning of you know
demon summoning and um so conjuring up a demon to question it to see whether it’s still useful in
your life okay and then what sending it away so that it doesn’t bother you anymore or i don’t
need you anymore okay um that’s a bit of a misunderstanding too okay so we’re going to
dive into what actually demon summoning is for probably the best way to do it is to bring an
example from literature and this is an example of a a failed demon summoning in other words a
magician who didn’t understand what he was doing and he failed to carry out this operation correctly
with pretty tragic results actually and of course those of you who know the poem you already know
how it ends and but not many people notice that basically this is a conjuration of a spirit
and then a dialogue with the spirit asking it questions and then unfortunately what happens
in the end though is that this spirit completely dominates the magician and that this is a
situation of horror because that’s not something you would want to happen when you conjure a demon
okay but the odd thing is though the reason you conjure a demon is because it has been
exerting power over you okay it’s a um so what is a demon a demon is a manifestation of past trauma
okay now the past trauma that it can be a manifestation of is not necessarily from
this life it can be from previous generations okay i don’t mean from past lives necessarily
i mean from previous generations inherited through cell memory uh scientific evidence
have shown that it is possible to inherit fears and desires from the experiences of your ancestors
okay that should be a no-brainer really okay so i mean where do you suppose if a healthy fear of
heights comes from inherited from some inherited memory if there’s inherited imagery going on
in there okay so these images come back to us in the forms of fears or things like that okay
Where does agoraphobia come from?
We’ll get to that in a moment.
Agoraphobia is like fear of open spaces or essentially fear of everything,
fear of being exposed out in the open.
Now this poem, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe,
the demon that comes up here, you could say it’s a demon of loneliness.
Or it’s a demon of abandonment, to take it even deeper.
okay so many people have a fear of being rejected by their community or rejected by their loved ones
okay or by being rejected by a mate or being abandoned by them left to our own devices and
we might now die because we don’t have any any support okay or we won’t be able to reproduce
because we don’t have a mate a partner anymore right nobody loves us so um that that’s you know
a pretty deeply seeded complex that almost everybody suffers from and so edgar allen
poe goes after it in this classic poem once upon a midnight jury while i pondered weak and weary
over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore it’s like a magician reading in his study
right while i nodded nearly napping suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping
rapping at my chamber door tis some visitor i muttered tapping at my chamber door only this
and nothing more okay this is i guess there’s a reference to spirit tapping maybe from the
days of seances and things like that right and so um something has started to happen and notice
he says while i nodded nearly napping okay because for a magician much of the work that he has done
while he’s awake in his magical ritual will begin to start happening in his dreams and particularly
between the liminal space between waking and sleep he can experience some really cool stuff
okay and so maybe this is sort of an example of a magician who’s tried to do a lot of work
hasn’t really worked so well but now that he’s let down his guard and he’s going to sleep now
that work is starting to show him things and so you might wonder whether he’s actually really awake
or the tapping is kind of going on now on the astral plane while he’s dreaming and this is
later in the poem it’s it’s a lengthy poem but we’re not going to do the whole thing open here
i flung the shutter when with many a flirt and flutter in their step to stately raven of the
saintly days of yore not the least obey since matey not a minute stopped or stayed he but with
mean of lord or lady perched above my chamber door perched upon the bust of palace of just above my
chamber door perched and sat and nothing more so something’s paying him a visit now in the form of
some kind of trauma figure okay so uh ravens were symbols of death and mainly because they would
lurk around the gallows when you hanged a criminal and they would pluck out the eyes and you know eat
the entrails and stuff like that it was often a raven or a vulture who would do that and of course
the color is ominous and the black for death and the beak of the raven has a sort of hook sort of
like the leaping hook of saturn right and so yes this demon has taken a symbolic form and the fact
that the form is winged as wings it’s probably important here and then the poem ends the poem
is much longer than what i’m saying of course so just these are just parts of it the poem ends
with the conjuration gone badly and the raven never flitting still is sitting still is sitting
on the pallid bust of palace just above my above my chamber door and his eyes have all the seeming
of a demons that is dreaming and the lamplight or him streaming throws his shadow on the floor
and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore
And this whole poem, he’s pining for his lost wife, apparently, and she’s dead, but he can’t seem to let her go.
And she is haunting him, and he can’t seem to get over her death.
And then he goes to his books to try to get some sort of cease of sorrow, and then, you know, drifts off to sleep,
and then this demon comes to visit him, this spirit from the night Plutonian shore comes to visit him.
and you could say it’s a representation of his own loneliness his own independence spirit of
isolation his own fear of death okay and so he does have a dialogue with it but he fails to deal
with it in such a way that he is able to get out from under its control and as you can see here
in the end of the poem he has been defeated by the demon and it still gloats over his soul
in other words he hasn’t broken free from his grief it still has him okay um how long will
that grief last not forever of course but it’s it feels like it’s forever like you you have to
you know have a few chances to break free of it and then if you don’t break free then you’re
trapped forever this kind of plays upon the idea of hell being forever nothing’s really forever
but of course if you are immersed in sorrow mourning for someone you’ve lost it feels like
it’s going to be forever and in a sense you know they’re dead they’re never going to be back in
that form again so yeah it is kind of permanent isn’t it so what should the character in that
poem have done what should the narrator have done in order to correctly or successfully carry out
a demon invocation okay um before we get into that um there might be some criticism about well
so liam is basically going into literature to talk about how magic works doesn’t he realize
magic is real and literature is just metaphors and so my response to that is that you need to
understand that literature and the arts is where we banished magic to try to convince ourselves
that it’s not real okay that’s a very important point so the metaphors that we experience in the
psyche those metaphors are the spirits they’re not simply merely metaphors they are the spiritual
forces that they supposedly represent okay same goes for when you draw a sigil in the air symbols
are the forces they represent okay this is a different take on magic okay it’s sort of the
ancient Egyptian take on magic. The words of power are the spirits. The metaphors are the
magical power. The metaphors are the spiritual power, okay? All right, so one thing about
summoning demons is truly horrifying, and Poe doesn’t touch upon that in The Raven. He simply
goes over a failed attempt to get out from under a demon, okay? You can see that you might conjure
demon so you basically you’re it’s an it’s an attempt to get out from under it so that it
doesn’t take you over anymore and possess you and control you and compel you to do things
all right and that’s not the horrifying part so we’re going to get to the truly horrifying part
of um demonic invocation uh evocation sorry so let’s go into uh meditation for a bit
so those of you who don’t like meditation you might take some comfort in my description of it
as being not very effective okay mainly because the way that we are taught to do meditation in
the modern world is to monitor our thoughts or maybe you know pay attention to bodily sensations
pay attention to what’s around you stay present and also to pay attention to your thoughts
as they come up okay and if if you get carried away and you stop paying attention to them and
that you find yours that you’ve gotten carried away you bring yourself back again and then
continue to focus on your thoughts or your bodily sensations okay and why do we do this well we do
this because we have supposedly have a monkey mind okay so our mind has the tendency to just
think all over the place and of course the thoughts we are thinking conjure up all these
stressful scenarios that aren’t even happening and we worry ourselves to death you know because
the mind the mind is going round and round with all kinds of anxieties and supposedly then we
meditate to de-stress and sort of calm down the monkey mind so it stops producing all these
fantasy scenarios of stress that are stressing us out and so presumably once we have the monkey
mind settled down we simply now have legitimate forms of stress to deal with and we have
eliminated we have eliminated all of the extra not necessary stress that the monkey mind produces
okay the only problem with this idea is that the thoughts that are bubbly bubbling up on the
surface of your mind they are really on the surface of your mind what’s going down what’s
what’s going on down there in the depths where are these thoughts coming from okay now it’s not
really possible for us to delve down into the mind to see the source of the thoughts where i mean like
are we going to start looking at nerve cells or something like that like how how do we so um it
seems like well all we can do is focus on what bubbles up on the surface and i guess that’s all
we can focus on that’s all there is right think about that so all we have is one that is what’s
on the surface? So rather than just focus on the thoughts or
the sensations that are happening right now, you can
turn your attention to the thing that is generating them. Okay,
it’s possible to do that. And in order to do that, you have to
have some literary skill or some or some artistic skill. This is
why magic is both an art and a science, you have to have some
skill with symbols, metaphors, imagination. Okay. And so if somebody were to try to teach me to
meditate, I would very quickly like criticize the procedure saying, wait, hold on. Why am I just
focusing on the thoughts? Where are these thoughts coming from? Let’s focus there. So the point is,
let’s not just focus on the thoughts. Let’s focus on the monkey himself. What does he look like?
how does he behave what triggers him and what does he look like at various times are there other
monkeys down in there okay and so you can use your faculty for personification or animism or
anthropomorphism these are all psychic abilities these are not just literature literary terms
remember magic was banished into literature and the arts to so that we could keep ourselves
safe from it right okay well it’s still magic so when we do symbolism and metaphor and
personifications and visualizations we then can tap into the things that are generating
what’s happening on the surface okay so when i decide to look at the monkey himself
this entity within me that’s having all these worrisome thoughts apparently right
what does he look like how does he act how does he move what triggers him okay and it could be
pretty amazing what we discover when we start to do that when we let the imagery arise okay
we can maybe even talk about um so when it comes to the edgar allen poe poem there the thing that
was causing the worrisome thoughts that were going round and round in his head i’m alone i’m alone
I’ll never get her back she’s gone forever around and round and round like um and and the point is
to be free of that and so the first step was to essentially notice what’s happening the second
step was then to have the spirit appear in some kind of form so you can talk to it okay why would
you just talk to the thoughts that it’s generating around around the thoughts aren’t really going to
do anything they’re not going to dialogue with you necessarily they’re just going to keep erupting
or going round and round it’s better to go after this sort of entity in there that is generating
the thoughts and then have a conversation with it what a novel concept okay it’s not novel at all
people have from ancient ancient cultures prehistoric cultures have known this since the
dawn since before the dawn of civilization and somehow we have lost this and of course now we
practice magic to get it back this ability to work with the supposedly deep aspects of the mind
and so we have this idea of standing in your magic circle conjuring a demon okay this little image
comes from the um the monster the monster manual of dungeons and dragons so much of what is being
circulated in the world uh in regard to magic comes from legitimate practices that at one time
were used to basically dialogue with your demons, to set yourself free from them, okay? Not only to
set yourself free from them, but to make friends with them, to understand them, okay? And to do
that, we draw magic circles, okay? If we don’t engage in ceremonial magic and draw the magic
circle with chalk on the floor or whatever like that, in our minds, we are still doing this anyway,
okay we make a concept out of ourself which basically means to circumscribe myself with a
sort of concept bubble making a thing out of me and then i then i then i of course draw a circle
around something else out there that’s like this is the thing that is bothering with me i’m giving
it some kind of form out there so i’m drawing a circle around it too okay now i can think more
objectively because what is it in order to think objectively i have created two objects me and the
thing that’s bothering me okay and this is what happens in the po poem okay something is causing
lots of troublesome thoughts for him he’s depressed his wife died i’m alone she left me
i’m never going to be happy again blah blah blah right and uh processing all those thoughts can
be difficult but you can use magical evocation to get through the process okay just to see through
it to see what’s really happening okay and in order to do that we can use animism some of the
words animism uh the the thing within the narrator of the poem that was causing him all the worrisome
thoughts about being alone and left behind and mortal and all this stuff uh he it now takes on
a form before him so he can have a conversation with it and make peace with it that’s a possibility
doesn’t always work though can be a bit dangerous can’t it maybe poe was warning us about that
was poe a magician i i think he he might have been actually but um because there’s stuff in
his writing where at least he studied the magic and things like that all right this this uh wizard
here is standing inside the pentagram um well the pentagram if you think about how it works
would normally be outside the magic circle and it would be used to conjure the spirit and i’ll show
you why normally outside the magic circle you have the thaumaturgic triangle the triangle of
conjuration and so the magician would stand inside his magic circle and notice the pentagrams are on
the outside and we have the triangle of manifestation on the outside as well on the
inside we have the hexagrams how interesting okay this is very much like the lesser banishing
ritual the pentagram which the golden dawn taught as a primary method for doing something right for
banishing supposedly right banishing and invoking and apparently for evoking or conjuring demons
and so the triangle of manifestation would be outside the magic circle because it represents
an avenue of approach and if you think about even the way that folk witches or
hoodoo practitioners had to let the um the legend of the crossroads um you go to the crossroads and
then conjure the devil okay um imagine that that’s really um going to the crossroads it’s kind of
like going into an agoraphobia scenario remember agoraphobia is fear of being vulnerable and out
in the open i could be attacked from any direction at any moment so standing at the crossroads is
like i could be attacked from any direction now oh my god um that’s putting yourself into a scenario
where okay now my demons can arise and okay show me what you got come at me threaten me okay so
that’s yeah going to the crossroads is kind of like that and so when somebody does the lesser
banishing ritual the pentagram is very much the same it’s you have the four directions and you
you have the four elements that you are conjuring up and not only that but spirits of the very
powerful spirits of the four elements okay they they both represent the elements as sort of threats
okay elemental forces are dangerous right but also as sort of rescuers like to try to protect
you from those forces okay protectors guardians so this is you representing yourself on as being
on guard against whatever’s out there that’s very important okay in the early magical work for
somebody who’s in the outer order of the golden dawn the way the golden dawn exists nowadays
the primary work is done through banishment and you’re not really conjuring demons deliberately
you’re simply banishing all the negative influences from your life but what does that do it pushes
them out into the periphery where they can now start to appear in various forms in your life
okay as you know worrisome thoughts as actual psychic images that trouble you okay and these
images tend to come in the forms of snakes creatures with horn horns and fangs and claws
or threatening natural forces like tidal waves and fire and lightning hurricane winds avalanches okay
Yeah, I think snakes and dogs or snakes and wolves were kind of big for me in the psychic imagery.
I felt like sometimes I was being attacked by phantoms.
It was not that big a deal, though.
And so, of course, for the outer order student of the Golden Dawn, he’s gradually getting attuned to how this works.
When I draw a circle around myself, I’m now portraying myself as a fortress against all the negativity out there.
So the negativity or the things that are producing troublesome thoughts and worrisome scenarios in my mind all the time
can now manifest before my waking eyes or in my dreams so that I can now dialogue with them and make peace with them.
And where does the student in the outer order do that?
He does that in his journal.
In other words, he just writes about the stuff that happened every day in his journal, and that’s a prelude to his ability to make peace with demons directly, okay?
But in the outer order, we’re just tuning ourselves into that process.
We’re not necessarily conjuring a particular demon yet.
I think you can see where this is going now, right?
All right.
And, of course, outside the magic circle is the triangle of manifestation, which simply represents you standing at the crossroads, okay?
And where does something appear when a spirit appears on one of those roads that are converging
in upon you?
You stand at the crossroads, you’re sort of vulnerable now, and any spirit can now attack
you from any direction, okay?
Or any troublesome scenario can now pop up to bother you and make you have worries and
thoughts, okay?
And so lo and behold, something might appear in the space outside your circle, and it appears
on one of those roads, because you’re at the crossroads, right?
okay so one of those angles of approach that you were worried about is now delivering some kind of
oh there’s a spirit there’s a manifestation of past trauma that i can now make peace with
and as you can see it appears within the triangle of manifestation or on that roadway
okay and that’s why the pentagrams are normally outside the circle because they are essentially
personification symbols it can be helpful too because if there’s something bothering us that’s
really raw like a natural disaster or something like that anthropomorphizing it can really help
us then dialogue with it okay there’s a lot to be said about that too i think my next video might be
about hell actually hell and the hexagram i think it’s going to be yeah the idea of hell like the
place of torment in the underworld and um the hexagram and the pentagram yeah it should be an
interesting video it is interesting too because conjuring up a demon something that is troubling
you is sort of like conjuring something from the abyss that is lurking out there but it you it’s
been so vague you couldn’t really put your finger on what it was so you sit down to do some magical
work to try to conjure this thing up so that you can see it more clearly and then if it doesn’t
come to you or appear to you but you give it a form with your imagination you give it that form
You use your faculty for symbolism and personification and animism and imagination to give it form so that you can have conversations with it.
And so we come to the procedure.
So just to back up again, the student of magic in the outer order doesn’t really know how to do this very well yet.
But the process of doing banishings every day tends to push these various troublesome entities out into the periphery of the imaginary of the imaginal space where they can spontaneously begin to take on form in his thoughts, in his dreams, or even in it before his waking eyes as psychic imagery so that he can begin to make sense out of them.
And mostly, you know, in the outer order, we just make sense of what’s happening to us in our magical journal to figure out, to give it some kind of meaning, speculate about what it is, where it’s coming from, how these experiences are arising, how they relate to my karma and things I have to process.
OK, and eventually, by the time you become an adept and you reach the five equal sixth grade, you get a clue.
You begin to notice, oh, now I see what’s happening.
OK, then you can really get serious about the work and go after particular demons.
The ones that have been troubling you all your life, but have always sort of eluded you.
Now that you know how this thing works, you can actually go after them and give them a form in your imagination that you can have a dialogue with, okay?
And then, of course, do they talk back to you?
Yes, they do, okay?
And we’ll talk about that in a bit, too.
It’s like, what if I’m not psychic?
It doesn’t really matter.
So let’s go over the procedure, okay?
The procedure is to draw a magic circle around yourself at the very least, okay?
it helps to be really formal about it so to charge it with you know divine names words of power
to do it in a ritualistic time invested way or energy invested way okay we’ll talk about
different ways to do that but obviously the most hardcore way of doing that is to have a magic
circle you draw it around yourself with a dagger or with a wand or something like that or even
draw a circle with chalk on the floor okay and then you’re standing within that circle and then
outside of that circle things can then begin to appear like on the view screen of your imagination
okay and in order to help them appear you also give them a circle of their own okay I’m going
to give you this area to appear in where you you can take on and it’s some kind of objectifiable
form okay so the first step is to draw the magic circle the lesser banishing ritual the pentagram
is an excellent way of doing that okay also the hexagram ritual and then of course um then you
could sit down and rise to face the demon okay so that’s where you’re going to start to
call up the emotions and the scenarios that have been triggering you and troubling you
okay or the thoughts that have been recurring that you would like to go away okay remember
these thoughts and these scenarios that are triggering you those are all surface oriented
things we’re not really getting at the monkey itself yet the demon itself right okay so um
and then you kind of um imagine yourself like okay i have arisen in this form me to deal with
this particular um troublesome thing okay this is you rising to face the demon okay so in other
words you have these emotions and troublesome feelings going on inside your magic circle okay
And then, of course, you could then imagine the same feelings erupting outside the magic circle in some kind of form, in the form of what’s troubling you, maybe, okay?
But what you’ll often find is that the thing that begins to appear is the same.
This is the behavioral impulse that tends to bother you, that routinely takes you over, makes you do things that you regret, you know?
What does it look like?
okay so normally if it’s a problem it comes in and takes you over and makes you do things
out unconsciously that you regret later okay and if you keep observing that outside the circle
gives you some power over it now okay and then of course you can give it a form that it appears in
it might begin to arise in its own form spontaneously give it a chance but if it
doesn’t go ahead and come up with a form that you think it might take there really isn’t much
difference between just going ahead and giving something a form or allowing it that form to
arise spontaneously okay um i’ll just give you a quick example of that when carl jung was doing
psychotherapy with his patients some of them thought that his dream interpretation stuff
was really all silly and nonsense and so they would they would just humor him and invent dreams
that he would ask what what they dream what they dreamt last night and they would be like well
i’ll just make up something i’ll make up some outrageous dream uh just to uh play around with
him okay so that he and uh so that he won’t actually go after the issue that’s really
troubling me like it’s too painful right so they start to conjure up this nonsense dream that they
never had at night and then he would begin to go after this dream anyway as though it happened okay
and he probably knew that they were making it up he could probably tell didn’t matter because
whatever they conjured up in that playful sort of let’s let’s see if we can fool jung right um
whatever they conjured up still was being fed by whatever their current anxiety or trauma or karma
is um forcing them to process okay so even when you think you’re just making stuff up randomly
and willy-nilly. That’s not really possible. So the stuff that you make up and try to be silly
with, it’s always going to have some kind of symbolic and important form, something to show
you. This is why the magician will tell, like an adept will tell his students, it’s not really
possible for you to lie to me. Whatever lies you conjure up are also representative of what’s
going on with you i can always tell okay that’s what that’s me what this means is if you think you
oh i there’s no demon out there taking on some kind of manifestation i guess this isn’t working
well go ahead and make up a form that it appears in okay and that form that you sort of ad lib and
just you think you’re just making it up randomly it’s not random okay so it’s good it’s basically
coming out of the same kind of space as your anxiety is coming out of or as your fear is
coming out of okay or as your troublesome desire is coming out of the demon rises okay so it takes
on some kind of form a form that you give it or a form that it seems to spontaneously assume anyway
uh that form can have all kinds of things could be animal form could have multiple limbs
could be a chimeric form like it could have different animal um body parts attached to it
something like that it could be vaporous could be liquid okay all kinds of things um could take the
form of a spark of electricity or a ripple on the surface of water. It doesn’t really matter.
As long as it’s something that can be contained within that sort of triangle of manifestation
or something that can be objectified. The demon rises. And so when it’s appeared, you can then
ask it the three questions. Now here’s where the experience comes into play. So somebody who has
been doing the magical work and has a lot of experience in confronting the psyche will be
able to answer these questions proficiently and get answers that are actually useful okay
somebody who is not yet very mature in in spiritual practice might not be able to handle
the three questions very well yeah it just depends on being experienced with magic okay
Some people are natural at it. Some people are pretty good at it. Don’t need a lot of experience, okay? Most of us do. And the thing we need experience at is art, literature, symbolism, language, metaphor, simile, not necessarily in a scientific way, but more in a literary sort of way and in a drama sort of way. So theater majors are really good at doing stuff like this.
the three questions are very simple what do you want question number two what do you really need
question number three and how will you feel when you get what you really need so you might imagine
the narrator in the poem the raven saying what do you want and the raven says as a manifestation of
his own hurt might be like i want lenore back i want my wife back i’m so devastated that she died
I want her back and then the second question is what do you really need and this is where the
experience comes into play because it’s basically what do you really need is asking for the
transpersonal answer what really needs to happen here so it’s not really what what do you need
anymore it’s it it’s more like saying the first question was what do you want okay second question
is what really needs to happen here okay and that’s more of a transpersonal answer and so
the raven in that situation might say i need to be free of this grief i need to be free of lenore
i need to get over this move on okay and then of course question number three is how will you feel
when you get what you really need and there might be a simple answer or might just be a feeling like
or both right and of course the raven has wings doesn’t it the raven will be free it’ll spread
its wings and fly away and not bother him ever again bye-bye okay until he loses somebody else
and might come back again and then he can but this when it comes back again it’ll be more like
of a friend it won’t be more like this troublesome demon it might even have a different form no longer
the raven of death who knows so uh yeah question three how will you feel when you get what you
really need and then the next step is to feed the demon you feed it what it needs okay and so
in your form you basically see up from the earth this sort of nectar rising up like like say you’re
a flower okay so the nectar rises up like your comes up into your body as though you’re some
kind of a plant and then the nectar rises up into the flower okay because that nectar is now going
to feed the demon and you can see that nectar streaming out in whatever form as that feeling
so the feeling that when you asked it you asked the demon how will you feel so this feeling of
freedom which might be sort of sky blue energy or maybe with with hints of gold in it or something
like that right or maybe lots of fluttering wings inside of the stream of free freedom feeling will
be coming out of you into that image of the raven and then you watch where from you does it come
does it come out of the heart as i imagine it might do here or does it come like out of the
forehead okay or just kind of indistinctly out from you okay out the mouth out of the breasts
like you’re suckling an infant right um so uh and then how does the demon take it in into the heart
into the eyes into the mouth okay you want to visualize these things okay
just like into the heart of its sort of vaporous mass whatever and then you watch what happens as
it as you feed in this nectar okay and you want to picture or conceptualize this nectar that’s
rising in you it has an unlimited supply there’s no it’ll never run out it’s coming right out of
the earth herself it’s rising up from the earth through you into into space and then out there
into the demon to feed the demon and the demon now is now taking in that feeling in this case
the feeling of freedom from the grief freedom from grief right and then you feed the demon all
that it seems to need and you seem to you just observe what happens to it as it receives what
it really needs to feel okay so it might dissolve entirely and just simply there’s nothing there or
turn into pure light might take another form might take a more aggressive form because um many demons
can become allies it depends right um there’s some um types of human instinct and and human
reactivity that will never go away they’re too deeply embedded into what we are as a species
okay so the process of feeding the demon is basically just making coming to terms with it
making friends with it so it’s no longer a problem understanding it and what you’ll notice here is
that the only way to do this is through compassion it’s a really a matter of the end oh this thing
that’s been arising with within me i have to empathize with it i have to understand the real
pain, not just the thing that it thought it needed, but what it actually needs. Okay. And
that’s something that is experienced in the heart. Yeah. Which means that demon summoning is not
really something that a psychopath could do. You have to have empathy to do it. Yeah. Then there
are the final questions you asked. And those are pretty cool. They’re very magical, sorcerous
questions. I’m not going to go into those. Okay. But you can find those in an article
in Forbidden Realms. It’s called Magical Evocation Part Two, I think. Yeah. There’s an article in
Forbidden Realms called Magical Evocation Part Two, where I do give what those final questions
are. Okay. This whole procedure is in that article. And then the final step is the clear
light. So eventually, if that spirit hasn’t dissolved already, eventually it does, you do
allow it to dissolve into pure light. Not only that, but you also allow yourself to dissolve
into pure light, because there’s something very interesting about that. In step two,
you rose to face the demon. In step three, the demon rose up, okay? So the two of you have
co-arisen. The two of you are co-creating, you could say, right? Okay, and there’s something
a little frightening about that because but what you notice here is that as the demon dissolves so
do you okay if i don’t have my fears and my desires and the things that trouble me do i even
exist do i really want to be free of my demons because then it’s like i don’t exist i can’t seem
to in other words we define ourselves by the things that offend us and the things that trigger
us and the things that please us and when those things don’t when we don’t need those things to
do that anymore. Do we still exist? This might begin to show you why people seem to enjoy being
offended, why they seem to cling to suffering, because if they weren’t suffering, it would feel
like they’re slipping away. All right, so conjuring demons through magical ritual, okay, might seem
like a bit much, okay? And for somebody who’s doing the Kabbalah magic work, I don’t recommend
doing it. Because as I said, you’re basically just learning how the psyche works by doing
the daily banishings and writing about your experiences in your journal. However, you could
still go to your journal and write a little short story about a sorcerer who conjures a particular
demon and then has a conversation with it and then lets it go. And to get a good handle on that,
you might go look up edgar allen pose the raven and see that as a failed attempt so watch what
happens as he dialogues with that demon and then see how um he doesn’t free himself from it it’s
basically at the end it’s gloating over him and he’s in its shadow and he’s um at least a failed
attempt okay of course it doesn’t mean he can’t try again he’s it feels like he’s gonna be stuck
there forever like he’s damned for all eternity right all right the true horror okay what is the
true horror of magical evocation of demons well one of the horrors is that the things that you
are afraid of or the things that are troubling you are we tend to view them as out there okay
they’re safely outside the magic circle and let’s like yeah we keep them out there because they
bother us we keep them away from us right and one of the the one of the horrifying things about
that is you begin to realize that oh no no no it’s actually it’s able to come inside my magic circle
and take me over sometimes okay and so uh these various horror films show that like um
we face the call it’s coming from inside the house um it’s a famous line from a movie when
a stranger calls i believe it is right uh and so why is that such a scary part of the film it’s
just kind of matter of fact right so the intruder is actually inside the house right
that resonates really deeply because the demons that haunt us aren’t really out there we are
somehow through our own negligence letting them in there’s a horrifying part right actually no
that’s a little bit of horror now the truly horrifying part is final straw pretty much the
final blow to the ego and this is this little scene is from the movie the sixth sense um it’s
about a psychologist who is helping a little boy who can see dead people and all through the film
he doesn’t realize as he’s helping this boy who has apparently a legitimate psychic gift for seeing
dead people the psychologist all through the film doesn’t realize that he himself is dead until the
end of course and then that’s that’s quite a shock for everybody in the audience as well it’s a shock
to him and it’s a shock to everybody in the audience it’s like all this time he’s been dead
oh my god why does that resonate so strongly people will say oh that’s just a brilliant
plot twist and then and that’s all there is to it okay well when it comes to things like
the things that bother us the spirits that bother us the um the behaviors that take us over on a
regular basis um as we arise to face these things that are troubling us okay that thing that arises
is also a spirit it’s also a demon okay in other words you yourself are a demon and in order to
really be free of suffering you yourself also must dissolve and disappear that’s why it’s funny
in this movie the sixth sense it’s both both horrifying and beautiful at the same time it’s
liberating when he finally realizes that he’s already dead and this is like you realizing that
my ego doesn’t even exist it’s just it’s just a spirit it’s just a demon and it can evaporate in
a second then what what’s left of me then and that can really be a shock to the system so all these
legends you know about um the sorcerer and the uh the the wizard and his apprentice and the wizard
turns the apprentice and said if i showed you the things that i do in my magic right now if i showed
it to you all at once they would terrify you and drive you crazy and drive you insane right
you would flee from here in terror that’s kind of true okay because the kind of work that the
adept has to do has to do the kind of work that the adept does requires that he is no longer even
there it’s gone okay so in order to work with magical forces and things like that you have to
be you have to realize that you don’t exist and for the new student of magic that’s the last thing
they want they’re doing magic because they’re trying to firm up their sense of identity and
existence and the actual thing that this magical evocation does is it eventually shows you that
you are just a spirit like all these other things that are eventually going to dissolve into pure
light you’re already dead you were never alive to begin with and so if you go through an ego death
well what’s left what’s left of you okay so and the way i define ego is that is that compulsiveness
okay so when the ego dies that means the automatic or unconscious affrontedness that it experiences
as it faces off with things in the world that’s gone okay we still face things in the world to
deal with them but it’s not done in an unconscious way anymore and so many people would say well the
ego still exists then doesn’t it no it depends how you define it so once the ego is dead it’s dead
and all that’s left is the persona
because you still have to arise in a form
to take care of this and that
but it’s no longer compulsive anymore
it’s no longer reactionary
and for the adept
somebody who’s not completely enlightened like a Buddha
that doesn’t mean that they are
totally conscious all the time
but essentially what it means is that
if an unconscious impulse arises
if a demon arises he’ll catch it before it takes him over because he’s done enough of this kind of
work to catch it before it takes over his behavior and controls him okay so he still has all these
troublesome instincts all these troublesome fears that he’s human right but he is able to catch them
as they arise and he’s probably made friends with a lot of them already and many of them he has
dissolved entirely or he has dissolved them entirely and he has dissolved himself in regard
to them entirely they don’t even they don’t even exist for him anymore and somebody who’s an adept
will sometimes look at you know their students and be puzzled for a moment because the adept
has already forgotten what it was like to experience that kind of trouble it’s like what’s
the problem here and then he has to remember oh that’s right that’s right i used to have this
same demon and it’s gone now it’s hard to remember what that was like it even disappears from memory
almost like it was like a bad dream yeah and it’s never really happened to be it was never really
there to begin with okay all right yeah so i think maybe next video we’ll talk about hell
and the hexagram and the pentagram all right so uh until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher