In 2013 I began an irregular campaign* ritual working (*this is a series of rituals that work together to form a larger macro-ritual over a longer period of time). What made it ‘irregular’ was the express intention of taking my personal and academic research into ritual and ritual performance, and summoning it into me through a process of ‘invocation’.
Though its occurrence varies greatly, the practice of invocation is a staple of modern occult work. Akin to the possession states of modern voudou or ancient oracular work, invocation concerns the summoning of, and drawing into the body, an external principal. This is typically a godform, though it could be ancestral spirit, an angelic power etc (generally positive or good stuff).
Doing this has the dual purpose of granting the invoked, let’s say ‘god’, a physical vehicle through which to act in the tangible directly, and as a means of allowing the invoker to commune with that godform and understand it from a position of mutual identification. In this sense invocation is distinct to ‘evocation’ which refers to the external summoning of an entity into an external but present space (i.e. outside the body of the evoker).
When I was a teenage magician I set about a similar series of invocations; then it was focused on the Great God Pan - the fearsome god of the pastures and the wilderness, whose name meaning ‘all’ has come to take on a more macrocosmic connotation. The idea had been to invoke the universe. Wow, someone has ideas above their station.
Some years later as my practices took a deliberate and refined approach I undertook the much vaunted ‘Invocation of the Holy Guard Angel’. This is the centre-piece of Crowleyean magical ritual - on paper at least - and, albeit described in a different ways, it is intended to summon into the magician their highest self; their true will; that which is in alignment with the universe. This is nominally called the Holy Guardian Angel. The idea is that by inviting this higher self into one’s waking awareness, one has a better idea of what on earth one is supposed to be doing with ones life.
The results were personally astounding (and are documented in the book The Voyage of Ulysses Black) and not the focus of this article.
However, following on from the outcomes of that invocation came an inner directive that I should summon ‘Ritual’ itself, like a god, into myself. And this is what I want to talk about today.
I:Ritual
At the top of this article I said I wanted to summon my research into my body. But surely, as material that has passed through my mind, which is at least linked to my body somehow, that research is already in my body?
However ritual is not a matter of simply containing abstract principles in the mind’s eye, no matter how grounded that eye might or might not be in the physical matter of the brain and nervous system. Just as ritual is not the text on paper that prescribes the rite. Ritual is a lived experience, it is something do. And in the doing, ritual becomes something that aligns intangible thoughts with physical sensations.
Further more, with the body as a central indispensable element, ritual also serves to externalise, often through symbolic devices, those abstract, intangible or remote elements. We do this so we can engage with those qualities by engaging with physical sensory symbolic stand-ins. Consequently we have a lived experience grounded in sensations impacting our nervous system and convincing us the experience is ‘real’ (even if symbolic).
So this, as apparently directed by my ‘HGA’, was what I set about doing with my research. I have plenty of physical bodily experience with rituals, and plenty of research about rituals, but I had not in a such a huge and lengthy manner, performed what I call ‘meta-magic’ or in this case ‘meta-ritual’, which is to say rituals to affect ritual. In this case, the idea had been to invoke and ‘become’ or ‘be possessed by’ or give ‘physical body to’ ritual as an abstract concept treated as external entity.
This meant creating both a system of symbols that would serve as stand-ins for elements of ritual research as the ‘godform’, and then symbolic elements that signified elements of me (alongside my physical presence), and then the mediating ritual elements that would enable the operations of the ritual - the things I would do, and the materials I would need for those doings.
Between all of these I would weave a ritual that sought to integrate that research as a conscious awareness, it would help me find different ways to digest ritual and it would, it transpired, make me further see the world through a ritual lens. This is one of the principal side-effects of invocation. Whether it is gods, archetypes or notions like ‘ritual’, that which is invoked is typically of a very specific and refined nature, and in turn shapes and sculpts the perceptions of the vehicle-body to an alignment with that specificity. It is also a doorway to obsession and madness, which in the case of the Great God Pan is rather apt. In the case of ritual, it’s really quite weird.
What made it particularly fascinating is that ritual is itself a method of experiential learning, conditioning and alignment. To use the structures that comprise ritual as the subject matter as well as the structure created an intense internal feedback loop, which is a subject that permeates wider ritual implications and should really be another article!
So, did the invocation of ritual work? Absolutely. Did I see the world through the ritual lens? It was like a ritual contact lens melted onto my retina. Did I have a sense of melding with a consciousness that was the archetype of my own ritual research… well in some respects yes that also happened. As for obsession and madness? Certainly one and maybe the other, I’ll let you decide which way round that goes.
For anyone that wants to know a little more of what I was actually doing in the ritual, there is a whole page about it and some more pictures on my website here.
Thanks for taking the time to read this article, please do give it a share if you think others might want to read it. And let me know if there are any elements of ritual that you would like address here at The Ritualist!