Descriptions:
Video Description
“Here is the question that quietly haunts every magician: are spirits real, or are they all in your head? In this lesson, Lyam Christopher answers with a clear and gentle map. Invocation means to call something into yourself. Evocation means to call something forth to appear before you. The magic circle, he explains, is a picture of your own mind, and the line between inside and outside turns out to be softer than most people think.
“To make it real, he tells the old Swedish story of Huldra, the forest spirit who is beautiful from the front but has no back. When a woodcutter follows her too deep into the woods, he gets lost and freezes; when she turns around, there is simply nothing there. James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology, loved this image as a picture of how the mind works. Spirits come forth from the background of the psyche, all front and no back, and we come out of the world in just the same way. Invocation, then, is letting the powers of the Tree of Life rise up and fill you, while evocation is calling up your fears and old traumas so you can finally make peace with them.
“The most powerful example is the old story of the raja who went into the forest each night and conjured a tiger, then pictured it eating him. It sounds terrifying, but that is the whole point: he fed himself to his greatest fear, woke up still alive, and fear slowly lost its grip. That same gentle courage runs through the daily work in “Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation“, which introduces these ideas one small step at a time. The invitation at the end is yours to take: do spirits exist out there, or only in the mind? After watching, you may find yourself saying what he hinted at all along, yes.”
Full Video Transcript
All right, good evening. Time for another video. Today we’re going to be talking about
invocation versus evocation. A common question asked in magic is, are spirits real or are they
all in your head? So if you’re conjuring something or invoking something, where is it happening? Is
happening outside or inside and there comes a point in people’s development where the distinction
between invocation and evocation becomes a bit blurred for a while they both seem like they’re
the same thing but eventually you begin to separate them again and they have different
functions essentially invocation versus evocation invocation means to call into yourself and
evocation means to call forth to appear before you so technically anything you call into your
magic circle you’re calling into yourself and if you’re calling something to appear outside your
magic circle you’re evoking it to appear out there okay so invocation inside the circle evocation
outside the circle the circle represents the psyche your individual psyche okay uh and anybody
who’s been practicing magic for a while you can see how these things can become blurred
so are these things all in your head or do they actually exist out there objectively i might be
clever and just say yes okay but that doesn’t really help does it uh so if we talk about
sort of the mechanics of the psyche here like how the imagination works we can produce an answer
that will make this clear for you to the point where you might not be able to really give an
answer to anybody who asks you, but you’ll know the answer in a wordless sort of way. So that’s
what we’re going to explore here. What’s the difference between invocation and evocation?
First of all, invocation. And to introduce this topic, I’m going to use something that James
Hillman likes to refer to in his book, Soul’s Code. All right, this is a, this is actually a
very readable book of his. He tends to be difficult to read sometimes if you read some of his more
academic material. He is the founder of archetypal psychology, James Hillman, and pretty much if you
are familiar with Thomas More, not from the Renaissance, but from the modern day Thomas More,
Thomas More is famous for a book called The Soul’s Code.
Thomas More was a student of Hillman’s.
Thomas More is more readable than Hillman.
However, The Soul’s Code by Hillman is quite readable.
I do recommend it.
In this book, he brings up the myth of Huldra.
It’s a Swedish myth he talks about.
Swedes tell a folktale of the forests.
the lumberjacks of northern pine fir and spruce used to work pretty much alone felling trees
lopping branches etc they drank they drank lots of coffee lots of alcohol and especially during
the winter they drank lots of coffee it’s sweden so when it’s winter time it’s it’s dark most of
the day it gets and there’s hardly any daylight sometimes huldra would appear so they’re working
by themselves in the forest, and sometimes Huldra would appear. This is sort of like
sailors at sea. They haven’t seen a woman in months, and they start to apparently hallucinate
that there are women out there in the water, beckoning to them. And there’s the myth of the
mermaid who entices them to come out into the water and then pulls them down into the water
to drown them. This is similar where you have a creature or a spirit of the forest taking a human
woman form and luring these men out into the woods to have them die out there of hypothermia.
Interesting idea because it’s one of the dangers of mysticism where you can go out into the world
and lose all sense of self and forget to take care of yourself and then you can end up dying
if it’s in the ocean you drown if it’s in the forests in sweden you freeze to death sometimes
huldra would appear she was an exquisitely formed creature delicate enchanting and irresistible
sometimes a woodcutter would stop his work even drop his axe and follow her beckoning farther
into the woods. As he approached, she turned her back and vanished. Once Huldra turned her smiling
face away, there was nothing. She had no back. And he, drawn too deeply into the forest, unable to
find familiar markings or get back to a clearing, lost his bearings and froze to death. All right,
well, the interesting thing is that James Hillman really latched onto this idea of this spirit
having no back okay and he would cite this as a demonstration of how the psyche works
a spirit comes forth from the psyche it is all front it has no back and it’s a simple way of
saying that is it is extended forth from the background into the foreground where you can see
it okay and so uh if it turns around it simply disappears or it withdraws back into the
background the universal background okay okay so it’s an interesting idea because uh in so in the
world of dreams when you meet a creature obviously it’s possible for a creature in your dreams to
turn its back and you can see its backside um but the idea of fuldra having no back is a demonstration
that spirits are really extended forth from the landscape of the dream if the dream itself or the
landscape of the dream wants to speak it will body forth some kind of spirit as a personification of
itself okay this is the way things work in the waking world too remember that one of the heretical
secrets of the mysteries is that we did not come into this world we came out of it so in a sense
we don’t have a back either we are all extended forth from nature and we will eventually return
back to it and become invisible again or be absorbed back into it again okay do we we do
have the back of course in other words but that’s you can see how that’s a metaphor so anything you
encounter whether it’s in a dream world or in the physical world uh is extended forth or bodied
forth from some kind of uh universal background all right that was the myth of hudra she has no
back so the interesting thing is when you are extended forth if you as a being yourself are
extended forth from something then uh the powers of the background are expressing themselves in you
in the foreground and one way to look at this is to basically say um all the powers of the tree of
life now fill you up from bottom to top okay but all the powers of the tree of life are not fully
awake in you yet and they’re not fully manifested in you so um what you’re doing in the magical work
is learning how to embody each of the spheres of the tree of life okay so here in this diagram at
the top we have the standard tree of life the uh sphera number one is uh kether sphera number 10
is Malkuth okay and then down below we have this sort of reflected version of the tree which
represents a human being okay and so in in the tree of life that’s upside down there below it
goes from one to two to three to four like that those that represents the tree of life as it is
producing a person okay I’m going to turn this upside down okay so now you can visualize a person
standing in that tree on the top uh the sphere number 10 the 10 is upside down the sphere number
10 is above the person’s head sphere number five is at the solar plexus sphere number two once
again the two is upside down that’s at the genitals and sphere number one is at the feet
and the the tree of life that’s down below is the tree of life of the divine powers that exist in
the universe and they pretty much uh go from one to two to three to four to five and they they um
they rise up into you and they grow like a tree you’re basically growing a tree in your aura
and the idea is that the um the various sphere oath of the tree of life are not
really fully manifested yet and you are learning how to manifest them what this means is that the
divine is gradually filling you up from bottom to top and this is how invocation works okay you
could see it that way as i i allow the spirit or whatever universal power i allow it to rise up
in my form to fill me up take me over okay and this can be literally experienced as rising from
the bottom and then eventually taking you over and pretty much filling you up uh and you are
uh pretty much taken over by this spiritual power all right um and there’s something very
important about that which we’ll get to later you wouldn’t you wouldn’t necessarily invoke
all types of spirits there’s only certain types of powers that you would actually want to evoke
okay the rest of those powers would be really uh designated for evocation all right uh we’ll make
that clearer later. Okay, and let’s move on to the Enochian system of magic. Once a student of
magic in the Golden Dawn reaches the five equals six level, once you reach the sphere of Tephara,
you can then start practicing Enochian magic. Enochian magic is an infamous system of magic
supposedly developed by John Dee and Edward Kelly
back in Renaissance times in England, okay?
It is infamous because it is notoriously powerful
and notoriously dangerous.
So I’m bringing it up here
because there’s something about it
that really shows us how invocation works, okay?
So let me give you the general schematic of Enochian magic, okay?
It’s very much like the astrological version of the universe.
Here, what you see are the terrestrial tablets, the Enochian tablets.
And ever since the time of John Dee and Edward Kelly, there are various adepts who developed the system further and further until the Golden Dawn took hold of it and developed it even further than that.
OK, the Golden Dawn did not, was not responsible for all the innovations of the Enochian system.
Between the time of John Dee and Edward Kelly, there were many innovations.
The Enochian system developed even more and more.
OK, and of course, the Golden Dawn took it and did even more with it.
And what we’re going to talk about is how these various squares work because they demonstrate how invocation works.
So what you can you can see this as the terrestrial tablets, which means that in your magical ritual space or your temple space, they are the floor.
You are standing upon this. This is like a floor of square tiles and you’re standing upon them.
Each of the squares naturally would have would offer its own perspective on the universe.
So you could you could look upon the universe through its from its vantage point.
OK, now above this tiled floor, there are concentric rings of power which act as tiers.
OK, they condense inward very much like the spheres of the planets.
OK, but you can see it like an amphitheater so that as you go outward, they rise up like stair steps coming down and sitting upon each of these tiers are Enochian angels.
OK, and these are the ethers.
OK, the various ethers.
what they represent are the condensations of power as the power condenses inward it becomes
more solid until eventually at the center where this tile floor exists that is the material
universe with air water earth and fire okay uh the ethers that are the concentric um stair steps
that condense inward in the amphitheater the ethers are also called aries which is really
cool like in other words they’re the aries of eagles an eagle’s nest exists on an airy okay
so you can see these angels are sort of perched uh on the on the seats of the amphitheater
they’re above you and you’re standing on on the floor of the theater doing your living your life
as an actor and everybody’s watching you all of these spirits are watching you they don’t call
them watchers for nothing okay the watchers okay there’s a whole myth about the watchers which we
not going to go into here uh so now the idea of these squares is that you can um look at the
universe through its perspective so if you look at any one of these lettered squares
you can transform it into a truncated pyramid and that looks like this okay so any one of the
squares of those enochian tablets um can appear as this sort of truncated pyramid with a chop
with it with the top chopped off uh and uh within inside the truncated pyramid there is an animal
form and on top of the truncated pyramid there is a human-like form an egyptian god form could
be isis could be osiris could be horus there’s about 20 or so god forms or more i think that
the golden dawn came up with okay um and the the the idea is really interesting because
inside the pyramid is the animal form of the sphinx which uh we could have a a human head
the body of a lion um it could be to have the hindquarters of a bull and the wings of an eagle
okay the human head represents the air element the wings of the eagle represent water okay so
So anybody who works with the Golden Dawn system knows that the Scorpio can be represented by both a serpent and an eagle, okay?
You might want to think of it like Aquarius, where there’s, I don’t know, air carries water.
So the wing form of water is more the more exalted form.
The lion body represents fire, okay?
And the bull, the parts of the bull represent earth, okay?
Now, the Sphinx that’s inside this pyramid would take various forms, okay?
If it could have a lion’s head, could have a human head,
that means that the powers of the elements are coming forth in different combinations
to produce different experiences or different perspectives, okay?
Now, the God form, sorry, the God form, the Sphinx,
The Sphinx that’s inside the truncated pyramid more or less represents the animal soul.
Let’s say each person, each of us has an animal soul and we have a higher divine soul, let’s say, a human soul.
And so inside the pyramid, we have this sort of unevolved or less evolved animal soul, which is represented by the Sphinx.
And standing on top of the pyramid is an Egyptian god form.
for instance, Isis or Horus or Osiris, okay, and the god form itself would have various elemental
colors attributed to it. And the interesting thing is that all of the Golden Dawn color scheme,
they can, it pretty much comes into play upon this pyramid, producing an interesting perspective,
okay. And if you were to work with these pyramid squares, if you wanted to explore that perspective,
you would start by visualizing yourself unevolved inside the pyramid as the sphinx and eventually
your consciousness you would see it rising up through the top of the pyramid and then occupying
the egyptian god form that’s standing on top and then from that point on you can behold the universe
through the eyes of that highly evolved super powerful god form okay um so that’s how it works
But the interesting thing is it sort of represents how the power of invocation works, that the powers of consciousness rise up from the animal form into the human form, into the God form.
OK, the and the various powers of the of the tree of life can can be literally experienced as sort of rising up and taking you over.
and most people that you meet are more animal soul than human soul uh be careful with that
don’t take it so literally um but of course the goal of the golden magic is to become increasingly
human and beyond human eventually so uh to to you you still have an animal soul but now you
develop a more human soul and eventually you develop a divine sort of soul like and these
various god forms that exist in the various squares represent aspects of your highly developed
divine soul okay or your neshama okay and so this whole this whole idea of sort of rising up from
the animal to the human to the divine this is the same way this is the same sort of thing that
happens with invocation the powers of the divine start unevolved and they rise up and become more
evolved through you uh it can be a very painful process because the the process of doing that
involves working through all of the evolutionary trauma that that animal’s soul has accumulated
and in order to become uh the human and then the god um all of that evolutionary trauma from nature
has to be um you have to make peace with it and you have to it eventually doesn’t dominate you
anymore it basically serves you that’s invocation here’s a crude example a crude drawing of here’s
the sphinx sitting inside the truncated pyramid and standing atop the pyramid there would be a
god form okay and once again if you were what they call it scrying the pyramid squares you
start out visualizing yourself let’s say as the sphinx and then eventually you your perspective
rises up through the top of the pyramid becoming that god form and the more god forms you learn
how to inhabit the more those god forms enter into your life and manifest themselves that is
one example of invocation now let’s go back to the idea of uh huldra who has no back okay so
spirits are extended forth in that golden dawn pyramid square example the um huldra has no bottom
okay in other words she rises up from the background of the universe or from the floor
of the universe and now is uh extending forth from bottom to top okay but this whole idea of
and huldra of course has no back so she extends forth from the universe which exists behind her
so if you are standing forth from something that standing forth could be seen as you standing forth
from nature in the background or rising up from nature underneath you okay but you can also see
yourself as extending forth from nature from the top down okay there’s no correct way of doing this
each way has its own perspective its own truth to it okay we’re trying to you know convey what
it means to experience invocation uh you’re calling something forth from a dimension that
we cannot really truly visualize with our physical brains and so we can conceive it in various ways
I can be extended forth from the bottom up, or I can, in other words, I arise into this world,
I come out of the world from down below, or I can come out of this, of the background from the top
down, as you can see here. So artists try to depict what it’s like to be Huldra, who has no
back okay uh you can also see yourself as extending sort of down and manifesting into a
body from the from the head down to the feet or here’s the same artist this is the art by alex
gray uh this is extended both from above and below so you have these various perspectives
manifesting uh or appearing from down below and from up above it’s interesting here because you
see these oh look it’s a bunch of enochian squares and you have each one each one of these bizarre
faces could be seen as oh this is a god form that is now extended forth from the universal
background okay to experience uh the interesting thing about invocation then um you’re not just
experiencing the form of the god form you are experiencing the universe manifesting in that
form okay hopefully this can clarify what invocation is like uh and so if when you do
invoke things you’re calling them into your circle it’s how do how do you experience it do they come
down is it coming down into your body from up above is it coming up into your body from down
below that’s pretty common by the way um and or does it come are you basically coming from the
back to the front like huldra in other words behind you is the universe and in front of you
is your um uh your ability to see things in the outer world the inner world is behind you and the
outer world is in front of you or the inner world is above you and the outer world is below you
or the inner world is below you and the outer world is above you okay all of these are valid
perspectives okay and none of them is accurate we’re simply trying to capture a dimension or a
dimension of reality through various um schematics okay and surprise surprise it looks a lot like
the Toros which is your aura and if you do the middle pillar work this Toros
shape is very similar to you very familiar to you and so what’s happening
here is this person manifesting from below or from above okay you could also
come up with another version of this where it manifests from behind the
interesting thing here though is that the electrical field of the aura the
physical aspects of the aura, they actually do take a torus shape like this, mostly emanated
from your heart. There’s an electric field around your body that sort of has this north and south
magnetic pole. And so that north and south magnetic pole seems to correspond to a manifestation of
your individuality arising from the universal background of the universe. Now this brings us
to the important concept of humility so um if you’re invoking something into you uh this is
the reason for these various invocations you might read just say i am nothing and you are all um take
me over i’m nothing i’m just a you know an empty shell and you can fill me up and this uh so that
sort of humility that is required for invocation uh in order for a greater power of the universe to
start operating through you if you think you’re the boss of it okay if you put
yourself above it it’s not going to work okay this doesn’t mean you can’t direct
that power but you have to adopt this sort of pious attitude allowing that
force to work through you it is much greater than you are okay and you have
to be careful not to identify with it as though as though you can have that massive universal power
crammed into you okay uh the best way to invoke is to to regard yourself as an extension of that
power you allow it to fill you up uh if you think that you can fill that if you think you can become
that that amounts to ego inflation okay that’s and that can be a big problem with magic and we
have talked about this in another video evocation all right uh so evocation is simply to call for
to call for something to appear outside your magic circle okay so um in invocation you are inviting
something to fill you up kind of like you’re a sock puppet you can see why that might require
some humility and piousness okay um that’s why invocations are a lot like prayers okay because
you know, religious prayers normally will have you expressing humility before the vastness of
whatever godlike power you are calling upon. Evocation is another matter because things
that you evoke are often considered less evolved than you are, okay? Not necessarily true because
you can evoke archangels, okay, which are supposedly much greater than you are in power.
But normally the evocation is reserved for lesser evolved spiritual entities
like demons and elemental spirits and things like that.
And quite simply, one of the easiest ways of looking at these various lesser spirits
is to see them as manifestations of evolutionary trauma.
And this is why they take frightening forms like demons with horns and fangs and claws
because many of the traumas we experienced in our evolutionary past
had some horrifying imagery associated with them.
They can also represent dangerous forces of nature
like lightning and flash floods, tidal waves, fire, things like that.
You might begin to see why demons have these horrifying flaming forms
and horns and fangs and glowing eyes and things like that our ancestors when they sat around the
campfire they could see the eyes of predators out there in the dark glowing back into the fire
okay they were reflecting back into the fire so glowing eyes are also you know can be a
manifestation or a an attribute of these lesser evolved scary forces that we call that we conjure
forth to make peace with it’s like you know you’re calling forth your fears or your phobias so that
can you know understand how they arose and how uh how they work and you are learning to um accept
them and in many cases they will cease to bother you they will dissolve somewhat or they’ll become
more friendly with you and stop hounding you okay and your life will become easier and you’ll become
a better manifester because as you work through these various powers you can become more uh human
and eventually more god-like as well okay uh and when you do that you would do that of course in
the spirit of humility because you in a human form aren’t you’re not a god in the human form okay
so if you do identify with a deity in your human form that’s called ego inflation
okay all right and so yeah evocation is to call something up from outside your magic circle uh
very often it’s very interesting too because um there is a an old story about a raja
if you talk about raja yoga especially in older forms of civilization it was the nobility and the
royalty who had special powers and magic was really only allowed to be practiced among the
nobility or the royalty and it was forbidden to the people who were the workers the proletariat
okay and so there are certain certain secret techniques that you would practice
to become a ruler of men to become more human and then eventually godlike and so you could
speak with absolute confidence and order people around things like that and those practices would
involve evocation there’s a story about a raja who uh every every night or every few nights he
would go out into the forest and draw a magic circle and conjure forth a tiger a spirit of a
tiger or a visualization of a tiger, and he would visualize a tiger eating him. And that practice,
as horrific as that might sound, would eventually have him make peace with his fear of death.
Whatever frightened him most, he would conjure it up and feed himself to it. And lo and behold,
oh, I’ve just been eaten and I’m still here. And when you do things like that, your fear becomes
less and less okay this is eventually this is essentially a way of working through trauma
okay anything that that any kind of trauma that’s pestering you fear of heights fear of water fear
of being eaten fear of monsters fear of snakes uh you conjure it forth and allow it to devour you or
you feed it you feed yourself to it okay uh i have an article in forbidden realms about that and it’s
It’s called The Secret of the Raja.
If you want to practice that kind of magic,
it’s essentially what magic is.
You’re evoking these things to make peace with them
and eventually you become more confident, more powerful,
and you become clearer.
You’re not taken over by fear so much anymore.
And this makes you a better manifester.
And so you can see that in evocation
that these various fears that you have
will be conjured outside your magic circle right almost like they exist in their own magic circle
okay and the interesting thing here is that you see that the human being is uh being bodied forth
from the universal background of nature and the uh the spirit itself is also being bodied forth
from the universal background of nature and this is why uh evocation and invocation at some point
will end up seeming the same for a while okay until eventually you notice the difference
you wouldn’t necessarily conjure up um a an egyptian god uh to make uh to uh to make peace
with it as though it’s some kind of trauma it’s more like you become that thing an egyptian god
form it could be the form of a human with a hawk’s head let’s say or an ox’s head or an ibis’s head
uh this let’s say it’s the god toth which is a human with a the head of an ibis okay
this kind of represents that the spirit of the ibis um is uh something that the god form has
conquered or made peace with okay uh so the various animal forms if you have a lion’s head
this means that the lion the powers of the lion are no longer intimidating to you
they are now more part of you they are no longer outside they you have fed yourself to the lion
and now you and the lion are one so an egyptian god form is more an evolved aspect of yourself
okay and this means that you wouldn’t normally evoke an egyptian god you can no harm in that
but um evocation is normally relegated for uh for unevolved uh lesser spirits that you are you
could say you’re absorbing them into you or you’re being absorbed into them okay uh and okay it’s
got to be careful with that because if you’re absorbing if you see yourself as assimilating
these things that could also be ego inflation all these powers become mine no not really true
evocation would involve you sinking back down into that universal field down below let’s say
and the and the uh and that spirit that’s in front of you also gets uh absorbed back down into
to below and you both are part of the same thing okay that’s the more humble way of doing it once
again you can see yourself extended forth from nature from down below or from the back to the
front or from the top down this happens to be from the bottom up this particular example here
okay uh and this is probably the most universal example for how people experience invocation
because you get to experience it as though you’re sort of like a sock puppet and that force is
taking you over from down below and it’s okay uh and this is why it’s also important to be able to
blow off a god form to be able to i uh if you try to identify with a god form and try to hold on to
it that’s you um imagining that you are as great and powerful as that god form and you are not you
are you but you can basically transform yourself into a conduit of that god form okay so there’s
a difference between you acting as an extension of a god form and and you identifying with the
god form of course during invocation you would you would identify with it but you would do it
in a humble sort of way where it’s like i just allow you to fill me up and i know that i could
never be as great as you and this this human form will eventually dissolve and disappear back into
the background of nature okay i’m hoping this is making things clear as usual i get this i’m
getting this impression that for many people it’s going to just make it all more all the more
confusing it kind of depends whether you are ready to understand uh this sort of deeper dimension of
the psyche and so yeah once again um you can experience invocation from the top down you can
just you can experience it from the bottom up and you can experience it from the back to the front
any which way okay we’re just trying to uh to portray in three-dimensional form uh what’s
happening apparently on some higher dimension so do these things exist all only in your head or do
they exist objectively out there based on the things that we have just explored how would you
answer that question. Do spirits exist out there? Do they exist only in your mind? If someone
were to ask you that, how would you then answer based on the things that we have just explored
together? You might want to put your answer in the comments. All right, until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher