Evocation

In the vocabulary of ceremonial magic, evocation is the operation of summoning a spirit, an angel, demon, planetary intelligence or other entity, to appear in an external space, classically within a triangle set outside the protective circle in which the magician stands. It descends directly from the grimoire tradition of medieval and early modern Europe, the handbooks of ritual instruction such as the Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key (Lemegeton), which prescribe the names, seals, circles and adjurations by which named spirits were to be constrained and questioned.

The magician's own safety was held to depend on the integrity of the circle and the correctness of the words. The later magical orders, above all the Golden Dawn, and figures such as Aleister Crowley inherited and reworked these procedures, and historians such as Owen Davies have traced how the grimoires carried this practice from clerical circles into the modern occult revival.

Evocation's classical sources are the grimoires of medieval and Renaissance Europe, texts such as the Solomonic literature and the collection later printed as the Lesser Key of Solomon, which list named spirits along with sigils, seals, and instructions for compelling their appearance within a protective circle. These texts present the operation without ambiguity as the literal summoning of an external, independently existing being, dangerous enough that the magician's protective circle is as important to the rite as the summoning itself.

Twentieth century occultism, influenced heavily by the psychological theories of Carl Jung, introduced a competing reading in which the spirits of the grimoires are treated as autonomous structures within the magician's own unconscious mind given symbolic form, so that the rite becomes a technique of psychological integration rather than literal negotiation with an external entity. Practitioners today are genuinely divided on this question rather than converging on either reading: some ceremonial magicians treat the entities as objectively real and the old safety precautions as necessary, while others explicitly adopt the psychological model and consider the traditional protective apparatus a dramatic framework rather than a functional safeguard. Neither camp claims the other's position is illegitimate within the wider tradition, and the disagreement is rarely presented as settled by either side.