Aspects of Evocation - Collected Essays by Phil Hine
by Phil Hine
1988

Excerpt:

This collection of essays, written between 1988-95, deals with aspects of the practice of magical evocation. My first lengthy foray into this much-misunderstood aspect of magic was a personal magical retirement inspired by accounts of magicians working the Abra-melin system, but perhaps more influenced in execution by the work of Austin Osman Spare and the Industrial art movement.

My experiences in this retirement are recounted in the first essay, Howling. At the core of this essay is the identification of cognitive-emotional-behavioural constructs as discrete entities - Personal Demons, if you will - a subject which I have dealt with in more user-friendly detail in Condensed Chaos (New Falcon Publications, 1995).

The next phase of work concerned the evocation of Servitors (lit: a person who serves another), prompted by a brief paragraph in Peter J. Carroll’s book, Liber Null (Morton Press, 1978). Working with the magical group, Circle of Stars, I developed a simple, generic approach to creating and evoking magical servitors. The basics of this approach are presented in the Servitors essay, followed by both an example of a rather successful servitor, and an approach to what I have chosen to call, “Functional Spirits” which requires no ritual trappings whatsoever.

The third phase of work concerned the more ‘traditional’ forms of evocation. Together with a colleague, Fra. GosaA, I embarked on a “Goetia Project” - the aim being to experiment with various approaches to the evocation of spirits, beginning with the Lesser Key of Solomon the King. Some observations on our results with the entities of the Lesser Key of Solomon are enclosed.