On Visible Manifestations

After a busy couple of weeks I'm looking back over some of the topics that have come up on the blogosphere during this last month. One of these is the discussion of visible manifestations during evocations. The discussion was started off by an article from Frater Ashen, which was followed by two others from MC and one from RO. The general consensus is that visible manifestations of spirits do occur in the course of the work, and usually people who say otherwise have little experience with working grimoire magick. I would agree with this, which may seem a bit surprising at first in the context of my published work. On page 112 of Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy you will find the following:

The determination of a ritual’s success or failure should depend on only one factor – whether or not the objective of the operation is achieved. It should not make any difference whether or not you see the spirit, whether or not you hear unexplained sounds, or even whether on not your spell focus explodes as you complete the conjuration. Such things are side phenomena unrelated to the operation at hand, and obsession with them can lead to a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the magical arts.

To clarify this a bit, with the Enochian angels you generally have to use some sort of scrying device like a mirror or crystal in order to see them. This lines up perfectly with the the history of the system, as this is how John Dee and Edward Kelley originally communicated with the angels and I assume this method would not have been necessary had the visible manifestations associated with those angels been more strongly perceptible. Furthermore, I would not necessarily characterize an interest in evoking spirits to visible manifestation as "obsession." While such manifestations are rare when working with Enochian angels, I also know from experience that they do occur when working with other grimoire systems.


The first Goetic ritual I was involved in was quite different from the Enochian work I was more familiar with, at least in terms of visible effects, as the Goetic spirit we evoked was visible without a mirror or scrying device of any sort. We were using a triangle suspended vertically from the wall, and once the conjuration was complete there was a definite visible form that seemed to manifest within it. It looked like the rough image of a face constructed from the shadows of the room, except that I was able to move my head from side to side, change position, and so forth and still see it, as though it were physically drawn within the triangle.

I was impressed enough by the image that after the ritual I tried playing with the lighting and so forth in the temple to see if I could duplicate what I saw, but after a whole lot of experimentation found that I could not. Furthermore, during the ritual the visible manifestation did appear following the conjuration and seemed to vanish along with the license to depart, so I can only conclude that this was in fact the visible manifestation of a spirit. For the ritual we had carefully followed the instructions from the grimoire, and so I have to say that like Ashen, MC, and RO my first question for somebody who did a Goetic evocation and didn't see anything would be how carefully those instructions were followed. It seems that adherence to the source material has a lot to do with whether or not you get a visible manifestation at all, as most authors on the subject suggest.

The thing about that ritual, though, was that other than the manifestation it was a complete bust. The information we got from the spirit was inaccurate and the charges we gave it were not carried out. So here's where I differ from some practitioners - I don't consider that a successful evocation even though the spirit was clearly successfully evoked. To me magickal success is about the results, not the phenomena, and I have yet to see much evidence that there is a direct correlation between the intensity of a spirit's manifestation and the successful achievement of measurable magical objectives. That's what I mean when I say that I judge magical rituals from their results.

In this regard it seems my perspective is quite different from that of practitioners like Frater Ashen, who considers the experience of evoking spirits profound and well worth the effort for its own sake. I don't see it that way in the context of my personal magical practices, but its also true that from the standpoint of magical practice as a whole visible manifestations are certainly an area in which there's a lot more research to be done. I'd be interested in seeing if the intensity of a manifestation corresponds to any sort of physical measurement, like an EMF detector, and whether or not the images can be photographed or recorded like some ghost phenomena can be. If anyone's done that sort of work and is willing to discuss it, feel free to share.