Oh, well, Hollywood.
So. Invocation. What's the deal, huh?
Uncle Al has this to say on the subject: "To 'invoke' is to "call in", just as to 'evoke' is to 'call forth'. This is the essential difference between the two branches of Magick. In invocation, the macrocosm floods the consciousness. In evocation, the magician, having become the macrocosm, creates a microcosm. You 'in'voke a God into the Circle. You 'e'voke a Spirit into the Triangle" (Magick in Theory and Practice.)
That's actually pretty straightforward for once.
Back in ye olde 1990s, invocation was introduced to many of us via the concept of drawing down the goddess (or the god) of Wicca. Books tended to stress that this was not something for just any newb to try... and of course all of us newbs routinely ignored any warnings we read. Warnings are for other people, dammit!
Our high-school 'coven' of course eventually came across a pile of invocations, and of course we decided we should totally try them out. NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.
Actually, usually nothing did. There was one girl in our group - who I'll call K - who was liable to get 'possessed' but honestly it was all playacting; we'd 'invoke' a deity, she'd spout off a little, we'd say thanks, the end. It satisfied her desire for attention, and the rest of us felt very witchy indeed.
Except once.
One member of the group held a sleepover in her pool house (my sister and I were poor as shit, but almost everyone else was a fairly affluent suburban kid so a pool wasn't an odd thing to have for them) and as we tended to do when we hung out, we'd get our witch on. This time, we decided to try out another drawing-down ritual. I think we were appealing to Brigid. Well, whoever it was, we didn't get her.
It's been well over ten years now, and I'm still not sure what to make of that night. K acted very strangely, very threatening, and whatever was inside her refused to leave when asked. She held her fingers in the middle of candle flames with no damage, chugged nasty rainwater, and spoke differently than she usually did. Eventually after much effort (and some very dry sarcasm from the girl whose house we were staying at) K lay down, we did the 'thanks, bye-bye!' ritual, and K seemed to come back to herself, albeit very groggily.
That same evening, one of the other girls had a mysterious welt appear on her leg. It was gone by morning, but while there it resembled a leering face.
K was not, to put it mildly, a mentally balanced individual. She was on some sort of stabilizing medication, which she often refused to take. She was also a huge fucking drama queen, and the main reason our 'coven' fell apart. As I said, in retrospect it's easy to see now how often she was shamming magical experiences. So yes, it's possible she was just THAT unhinged that evening. But I don't know.
Memory is notoriously unreliable, but my recollection of that night involves a very heavy atmosphere unlike anything we'd experienced before. A storm had sprung up outside, and the whole night was one giant clusterfuck of negative emotion. I remember standing on the little staircase leading up to the apartment over the pool after everything had calmed down, trying to relax. I was the oldest, and so I tended to assume responsibility for rituals and the like, and I was badly shaken. I remember confessing tearfully to my sister that I thought I was to blame, because a few days before I had prayed to Loki, possibly the most infamous Norse god. (This event actually scared me away from that particular god, whether or not He had anything to do with it.)
We never got any answers as to what exactly went on that night. The group fell apart soon after, and most of the girls grew out of their Craft Phase.
Many years later, my dear aunt would have her own 'the Craft' moment. That video posted at the beginning of the entry? Yeah, my aunt decided, in a moment of grief, to basically crib the lines there in an attempt to contact her recently deceased father and just shouted at the universe, "I invoke thee!" What thee? NO IDEA. What she got was something nasty, and eventually she called my mother, my sister and I in to clean it up.
The moral of these personal anecdotes is this: invocation really is something that can fuck you up. That doesn't mean one shouldn't do it, but to echo all those books I ignored as a kid, it probably is something you should do after you've got some real magical experience under your belt. More importantly, there are ritual frameworks that work much, much better for invocation than just reading crap you've found in a Llewellyn Wicca 101 book, and in this internet age you really can't claim you don't have access to them.
And for crap's sake, don't pretend to be Nancy.
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