Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current - Andrieh Vitimus 2009

Invocation Theory II: The Advanced Stuff

Where We Left Off

In the last chapter, we covered the basics of how to do an invocation using all the techniques we discussed previously in the adventure. Now I am going to reintegrate some points I made in the last chapter before continuing.

First, the memory of a successful invocation is enough to do a new invocation. Let's try another experiment. Go back to your journal. Try to pick a breathing style and posture that seems to generate the greatest level of trance state for you. If you think there is a posture that seems to fit with what you know about an entity, go into the posture. Relax and center yourself. Close your eyes. From here, try to remember the successful invocation of a spirit. What did you see? What did you feel? What did you hear, smell, or taste? Try to remember every little detail from the first-person point of view as if you are actually back at that time. For each sight, make the vision as vibrant as possible. For all the sounds, make the tones seem to fit together perfectly. Imagine how intense the sounds were. Imagine how intense the smells were. Allow the feelings in your body to completely overwhelm you. How was the experience?

Now remember our basic NLP tutorial from chapter 6. We can (usually) intensify any experience by adding more vibrant sensory data to the memory of an experience (Andreas and Faulkner 1994). Ultimately, your perception must filter the experience of an invocation. This means that you can create more compelling invocations even from mediocre invocation experiences by going into a trance state and intensifying the sensory information from the memory of those experiences. We have done this with other memories. The process is no different.

To go back a minute to the idea of relationships and interconnections with spirits, we can see that as a relationship develops, it will get easier to communicate with and invoke them. In the same way that we were working with sympathetic magic, we can use the techniques presented earlier to open wide the links to spirits while working with them. A spirit may or may not decide to open the link on its end (depending on what you are working with), so there may be a process of gaining a spirit's perceived trust. However, in 99.999% of the cases, the biggest barrier to working with any spirit is in the person summoning the spirit.

Setting Aside the Ego Part

The single hardest aspect of deep invocation or possession is the dissociative process. Possession is really a bad word for the process; I prefer the Voudonic term being ridden or deep invocation. In America, possession has the connotations of demonic influence, and flashy movies such as The Exorcist certainly have strongly linked the concept to a fearful state. In the West, we simply aren't raised in a culture in which we are trained to accept not being "in control." However, most of this adventure should clarify that being "in control" is much more of what we pay attention to than it is controlling all of our impulses. In essence, the idea of the ego is a story we make up to give continuity to our experience, and it is more likely the events that we pay most attention to.

The idea of being "in control" of the self is an ingrained illusion of individuality as well as one of the tenets of ceremonial magic. For the sake of argument, let's assume (and you can debate this on your own) that control sometimes acts as an impediment to magical operations. Let's think about what control means for a while. Throughout the day, we shift into different states of consciousness. In fact, at some time we may be engrossed in a memory, reading a book (such as this one), or talking with someone. At these times, we might not be paying attention to our surroundings at all. I am sure you can think of a time where an emotion, memory, or situation flooded your senses and greatly colored your perception. I have had moments like this where I can admit that perhaps I was not so much in control.

The majority of exercises in this book attempt to bring a person willfully into a state of alpha-wave trance. Essentially, this is a state where the ego, or continuous story, fails to function correctly. The critic is overwhelmed, and then the magic can work. The final step in this process is shaking the hard idea of the "I" and allowing another entity to take over. Think back to our adventure when we were working with different aspects of the self.

Go back to your journal. If you really think about it, is the "I" the same person as when you are remembering those experiments, or is the "I" far, far more fluid and dynamic? If it's more fluid and dynamic, even the idea of the "I" is a convenient illusion to help with the consistent story.

Admittedly, deep invocation is not for everyone, but it is an extremely effective technique for results-driven magic. If you personally get to know me, I will tell you about my favorite entities. Most of us in America are not from cultures that implicitly trust these entities or trust any entity enough to allow it control. Before I continue, I have to point out that you can deeply invoke anything you can conceptualize into a form. This includes getting ridden by the lwa or other spirits, or deeply invoking a Goetic spirit, demons, or even angels. For a while now, I have wanted to do a Jesus possession rite (as per the Gnostic idea of Jesus).

A large part of the process is getting into a sufficiently deep trance state in which dissociation is possible. Essentially, we come back to the singularity of mind. From here, trust is often the determining factor. Very good magicians/shamans can get possessed by things they don't know well, but they will generally have absolute trust in their own personal ability to force the spirits out of them and to break a trance state, even when the spirits have control over their bodies. We will cover a couple techniques that I have used in order to get possessed by something and still stay relatively safe. Generally, your relationship with the entity, the situation, your well-being, and the people you have around you at the time will determine whether or not you feel it is okay to let yourself go. The amount of trust you have in the entity or the people around you will determine how much of a possession is possible after training and working magically.

Yes, all spirits can lie, just like all people can lie, but if you have a solid relationship based on earned trust, you can be relatively sure that the entity does have your best interests at heart. One way to think about possession is to realize that, as with most of the things we have been covering, it is a state of mind. Through the exercises we have been working on, we know how to change a state of mind.

The Window: Moving Toward Possession

Let's try a simple thought experiment that might help you with going deeper into invocation. Remember a time, if you will, that you were on autopilot. I am sure you can remember a time that, while driving or walking, you were not paying attention to all the details around you. Your consciousness was wandering around, but your body knew automatically what to do.

Now I want you to imagine for a minute the sensation of seeing through your eyes while feeling that the body around you is a human suit. Imagine that the suit is extremely comfortable. Allow yourself to be fully immersed in happy memories, or concentrate on an alphabet of desire link of happiness. Imagine the sensation while fully being in a happy, comfortable mood, looking through that suit and temporarily not being able to control it without a great deal of effort. Keep coming back to the happy memories while being unable to move the suit. Keep breathing, becoming more relaxed and allowing yourself to just let go.

This feeling of being "there, but not there" is one we often have when the autopilot is engaged. It is the same feeling that occurs in a deep invocation. Deep invocation is much like relaxing into the autopilot state and allowing the body (including speech) to do what it's automatically going to do. The biggest problem with deep invocation is that thoughts, actions, speech, and states of mind occur that are not linearly congruent with what the ego is expecting of itself. Essentially, we struggle to maintain the "I" concept in a congruent story, because there is not a deep enough trance state and the "I" is the toughest and most aggressive defender of its turf.

There are a couple of simple exercises to help with this. First, for a couple weeks, continuously refer to yourself as "we" or, even better, "the we collective," whenever you can. Stare at yourself in a mirror and meditate while repeating "We love we." Try to go into deeper trance states while doing this simple meditation. This is horribly annoying to some magicians, but it does work at first. Take on happy memories while you are doing this. This exercise is so simple, but what you are telling yourself is that the "I" is much more of a collective. If the "I" is a collective, then why can't an outside "entity" temporarily join the collective?

From here, try to do things that you normally wouldn't do. Try to meditate on the experience and find a part of yourself that does like the experience. In chapter 13, we were focusing on different parts of the self that perhaps the "I" does not like. Nonetheless, they are still there. Let's go back to those parts of our adventure and redo those exercises. This time, however, we are going to try again to convince ourselves that the "I" is a convenient lie that helps with the mundane world but is not fully conducive to exploring parts of ourselves.

Convincing yourself that "I" is a relatively mythological creation, and being comfortable with the "we love we," should ease the transition to deeper and deeper invocations. The final step to practice for a very deep invocation is the idea of being in the human suit, watching, but not really being there. In this way, your body reacts and moves, and you observe almost as if from a distinct window, allowing your body to move on its own.

The First Deep Invocation

I do recommend that you have a partner for the first couple of times you try these experiments. This exercise will be very similar to any other invocation. In fact, if you have been doing invocations for a while, it will be very similar to those invocations. Ritually, the invocation should take place in the way you feel most comfortable, with a spirit that you feel you have a solid rapport with.

Now generate a deep trance state while doing the invocation or even recalling the memory of a successful invocation. When you feel you are in a deep trance state, and the states of mind associated with the entity are fully in the front of your mind, then allow yourself to see yourself as that human suit while you are simply watching your body move on autopilot. Completely relax and allow yourself to go for an amusement park ride in your human suit.

If you stop yourself after you know the entity is most certainly in your head, that is the "I" struggling to maintain control. Keep working on the exercises in the previous chapter, and make sure to generate deeper levels of trance. If you can, completely allow your body to go on autopilot while you watch. Congratulations on your first deep invocation. It will be a great tool later to get possessed by other things.

Auric Shapeshifting and Invocation

A couple chapters back, I described a game involving auric shapeshifting. Let's go back and make a bubble around us that has a particular form, just like we did in the previous working with auric shapeshift ing. Again, we are creating a bubble around us and then using our will to give the bubble form. Once you can reasonably create a bubble around you that has and can hold the form of the entity, then you can move past "faking it" and use the techniques of invocation to bring the entity inside you.

When we have the outer aura similar to an entity's aura, and the inner state of mind projecting corresponding resonances similar to an entity or from the memory of a successful invocation, it is relatively easy to invoke the entity. Now, when I do this, I consciously try to hold the outer "visualization" while doing the invocation until I can no longer hold the outer visualization, since I don't really know who I am at that point. Deep enough gnosis must be achieved for the dissociative effect.

There is an internal method that I sometimes use to make the possession grow even stronger. Visualize yourself not as a solid being, but as a mesh of finely woven, glowing threads with your image on the outside. At this point, you are outside of that "entity" auric suit around you. Visualize the entity you are invoking as an overlay that fits perfectly with your auric suit. You and the entity are sharing the same space, with a bunch of threads moving about inside the shell. Remember, you are combining this visualization with a mantra and resonating (or thinking about previous invocations).

See that entity also as being a mesh of finely woven glowing threads of a different color. Spend the time visualizing each thread of the entity you are meshing with overlaying your threads. Essentially, while you are chanting and/or dancing, you are visualizing the entity thread by thread, covering your threads until you cannot keep the visualization and chanting going (because you don't really remember who you are per se, and because you are fully invested in the entity). This visualization trick has helped me go into pretty deep possessions, since the visualization is complicated enough to occupy the conscious mind and, from my perspective, is energetically suppressing my energy pattern and allowing that pattern to completely shift toward the entity's.

The Dangers of Invocation

You should be aware of several dangers with invocation. Invocation generally puts you into a different, alien state of consciousness. An alternate state of consciousness is only temporary, unless you keep coming back to that state. Think about it: if an entity has a greater level of direct access to your subconscious, it is easier for the entity to manipulate you. Even if the entity is wholly internal, it may increasingly try to gain manipulative control. Essentially, it replaces the structure of the "I" to gear the "I" toward feeding it. This type of obsession is slightly more common than people think. After an invocation, an entity is part of you. Whether or not it exists outside of your mind, you have a memory of that entity. A strong enough impression with an entity can become a compulsion, just like any other strong emotive reaction. If the compulsion/habit is adaptive toward your success/happiness, it can be a good self-change technique. If the compulsion acts against you or has little benefit to you, it becomes pathological.

Every entity, whether it is internal or external, wants to be fed. Some entities might come to the conclusion that they can take more and more, to the detriment of the individual. Ultimately, this has the effect of drying up the person, because a happy, stable magician can generally produce more energy for spiritual work. Now, in my life, I once did a possession rite with a group of people. They wanted the main participant to be possessed by four Titanlike forces, including Tiamat. This was going to be accomplished through BDSM needle play and intense chanting. I was the main operator to get the participant possessed. Now, I did warn the person three times on different occasions that I thought the ritual might be a little much for him (of course, he did not listen, or else I would not have a story). In the ritual, he most certainly did get possessed, since I am a good magician. However, the real interesting part of the story is that months later, when people were talking about the ritual at a campfire, the person got up and walked away from the campfire. He did not remember getting up. He did not remember how long he was gone or what he did. I heard this account secondhand, but it is not the first time I heard of something like this happening. Essentially and unsurprisingly, the memory of a possession with ample contextual clues is enough to cause another possession. We have seen this as a consistent theme in the book.

When a memory or internal construct competes with the will for control of the "I," there is a problem. Some entities have been fed a lot of energy from many people over the years. In addition to the mental discipline we were developing, there is a simple counter for this sort of thing. Remember, if we can turn down the sensory input from a thought or vision, we can reframe it and make the experience matter less and less. Just like any internal voice or habit, we can turn down the amount of sensory information that we have tied to an entity. It may be necessary to cut a tie to an entity entirely, if the relationship proves caustic for you. Of course, banishing, centering, and meditating regularly can help with this. Those techniques of banishing, as well as making something less interesting to the mind (duller, farther away, flat, etc.), are found in the earlier chapters of the book.

Changing the Self with Invocation

While invocation has its downsides, it also has a ton of positive sides. First, there are a lot of benefits to "not" being you for a little while. That shift in perspective can cause you to see more options and solutions. Additionally, if the invocation is successful, it offers you a chance to change parts of yourself that might not entirely be in your conscious control.

Depending on your point of view, you are either bringing a hidden pattern of the subconscious to the forefront or embedding an alien pattern into the brain. I tend to think of entities as external and internal combinations, but I will of course change that belief if it means I will get more solid results in my personal practice. This alien pattern can be useful. None of us are perfect. We all have maladapted patterns that are hard for us to break. Hypnosis tends to try to change those patterns, and invocation takes another step. First, you are usually asking to change something in yourself, and second, you are asking an entity for help to keep it changed so that there is no backsliding. Essentially, you are asking an external agent to change the pattern and help you keep it changed.

Additionally, if you are doing further magical operations and you have invoked another force, it is the "force" that is carrying out the magic from that point. This, as Peter Carroll notes, is a sleight of mind. You've tricked yourself. In addition to tricking yourself, you have this nice external construct (or an internal one) working to produce the result from then on out.

The greatest benefit of invocation to me, however, has been the knowledge transfer that occurs. I can honestly say that I have learned tremendous amounts of magical techniques and knowledge by invoking entities and asking/offering them the right things to get that knowledge. Once I mastered the techniques of invocation, I found that the information transfer is much faster than studying the material. Of course, studying the material related to what you are learning from an entity, while at the same time doing the invocational knowledge transfers, generates the greatest level of success in remembering the techniques. This knowledge is filtered through the subconscious, meaning that what bubbles to the surface will be uniquely yours.

More than once, I have been in situations that required an interesting magical working, and I just happened to know how to do the working. If entities are a combination of internal and external forces, perhaps they would be willing to share the external memory of magical techniques. Don't believe me? Develop a relationship with a spirit, and then do a deep invocation rite with the intent to learn magical techniques dealing with the entity's sphere of influence. Have fun and see what happens over a couple of invocations like this, and what kinds of techniques you develop after the sessions.

Empowering Other Workings (Sigil Workings or Sorcery)

Invocation can be used as a precursor to further magical work. Before I dive into the mechanics of this a bit, let me discuss why this can work. Invocation generally does increase the level of trance as you slide out of yourself into an alternate persona. Additionally, this allows a certain sleight of mind to take place. (It is not me doing the magic, it's the spirit.) We have a lot of conditioning, even in the West, to believe that "spirits" can do stuff. Another way to think about this is that you are bringing in a guiding energy toward the process. For example, a love spell with Lilith would be very much unlike a love spell with Aphrodite. The two entities are wildly different in myths and the energy invoked would vary greatly. The type of lover you would be drawing to yourself would be far different in each case, even if every other part of the ritual were exactly the same. This provides a context to the energy you are sending out in order to achieve your goal. In the same way that we map divinatory energies to provide contextual information for a goal, we can invoke an entity to provide more of a resonance context for a working-without really being so specific that the result can't manifest.

Often, in many traditions, entities are invoked or evoked at the start to provide internal shielding, strength, and protection for other work. Usually, the protective spirits are considered "higher spirits," and they seem to vibrate in ways that are at odds with what you are summoning in later parts of a ritual. Generally, this technique tries to empower the aura and presence of magicians so that no "influence" of another force can penetrate into their minds. Standard ceremonial magic uses this technique often. Essentially, the invoked force acts as another safeguard. This is more sleight of mind. (Certainly a god can get results, whereas lowly me can't.) Or so we are conditioned to believe.

Of course, another really good point is that if the entities are external-and I am not saying that they are-you will have a spiritual force empowering and working to achieve the goal. This comes into play much more in evocation.

In the practical sense, possession rituals for sorcery using sigils or requests generally require two or more people to get reliable results. First, one person has to get possessed. The second person has to make the request of the entity or present the sigil to be carried out.

However, for all the other workings, the invocation is just another step tacked on before the actual sigil working/sorcery/evocation (which we will cover in chapter 28). A simple sigil magic working would be to banish, invoke the power you are working with until a deep trance is achieved, and then empower a sigil with a mantra. In the next chapter, we will cover a few more examples of this. If you have been doing the other techniques, just add invocation to the start of the mix.

One interesting thing about invocation is that they can be stacked in sequence to produce greater levels of trance and increasing levels of energy. There are several explanations for why this occurs. Try to think of a few invocations based on trance states, energy, etc. You can stack different powers to create a certain resonance associated with your goal.

Summoning of Usui Sensei: An Unorthodox Invocation Subject

Some of this ritual will seem odd, but it is adapted for the hotels' no candles/no incense rule. It is respectful to meditate and try to contact Usui Sensei, the founder of Reiki, for permission before doing the ritual. It is polite and shows you are serious, which is typical of Japanese culture.

Requirements: A string of Christmas lights, an oil diffuser, and some pleasant-smelling oil.

Statement of Intent: "It is our will to invoke Usui Sensei so that way he may reach out and instruct us in Reiki."

Procedure:

Banish by the preferred method.

The participants should stand around a circle of lights, and the person designated as the vessel should sit in the middle of the circle.

The participants should then join hands around the circle in a very solemn and respectful manner. They should will healing/white/good intent and energies (love and laughter) to fill the circle. As they are doing this, they should start to sway slightly, visualizing Usui Sensei coming forth to "ride" the vessel. For simplicity, it would be helpful if everyone were swaying in the same manner, left to right in this case. This may appear as Usui Sensei descending on and over the vessel or as his visage floating over the vessel. While swaying and visualizing Usui Sensei descending, all participants should create a mantra of "Usui, come grant us healing knowledge."

When the vessel knows that Usui Sensei has descended onto him or her and is properly invoked, the vessel will stand and then walk over to each participant and Usui then will "touch" each one in an appropriate manner. Usui may say something to them as he wills or as the situation requires. Usui will most likely pull an individual into the circle to speak with that person. As each person is pulled into the circle or is "touched," everyone else will continue to chant and will the healing/ light/good-energy intentions into the circle. As one person enters into the circle, the others should adjust their position again to clasp hands.

The vessel will again sit down after all participants have been "touched" After all participants have entered into the circle or after they have been touched in some way, everyone should thank Usui Sensei and ask him to leave the vessel. This should be accomplished by chanting, "Thank you, Usui Sensei. The vessel has much to do today. Please depart, but communicate with me in dreams, so I may learn."

When Usui has departed, the vessel will stand up. At this point, everyone should laugh boldly and firmly (in other words, banish by laughter).

Each time we have done this ritual, it has been a strong healing ritual for everyone involved.