Invocation Yvonne Aburrow

Why do we do invocation? Who benefits from it? I would argue that both the
deity and the practitioner benefit (and hopefully so do the other coveners).
Human awareness is finite and local to one particular area of space-time, that
is to say, here and now. Divine consciousness seems to be both spatially and
temporally unfocussed, and potentially infinite. So deities can benefit by
accessing our local, temporal and focussed consciousness, and we can benefit
by accessing their atemporal, non-local and multiple perspective consciousness.

Another benefit is that by practicing theurgy, some of the virtues of deities

might rub off on us. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the divine presence is
invoked into the Eucharist before it is distributed to the communicants, who
then ingest their deity. This is said to bring about the process of theosis, which
means becoming divine. Indeed, Jesus actually said, I have said, ye are gods.
(The trick is becoming aware that we are gods.) A similar practice occurs in
Tibetan Buddhism, where special consecrated pills are distributed to the
people. Indeed, our own Wiccan cakes and wine contains echoes of this idea,
as we consecrate the sacral meal by infusing it with spirit. But invocation
should, at least in theory, be a shortcut to theosis, because instead of eating
food that has had a deity invoked into it, the deity is directly invoked into the
practitioner. One possible pitfall here would be if you always did invocations
with the same type of deity, for example, always dark goddesses like Kali,
the Morrigan, and so on. I also do not see why we cannot invoke goddesses
onto men and gods onto women. So I think we should take care not to get
typecast. If you always go for a particular type of deity, you might want to
consider why this is, and try balancing it with a different type. Later in this
talk, I will be telling you about a Tantric Buddhist practice which has great
potential for overcoming this problem. Another possible pitfall is that you
might get so into the power and glamour of the whole experience that you
become convinced that youre the most magical being since Aleister Crowley
though this might just be a pitfall of the magical path in general.

When discussing invocation, the role of the invoker is often overlooked. But it
is very important; otherwise the invokee either has to say that they are not
invoked (we have a convention that we will use the gesture of crossing the arms
in the God position for this, though we have never had to use it). Or they have
to fake being invoked (which is a bit like faking an orgasm in my opinion). Or
they have to use a previously prepared charge. Or they have to quickly invoke
themselves (which is a bit like self-initiation very difficult, but not
impossible). So the invoker is very important. In classical Indian music, they
identify three movements of the raga, which is a piece of music that calls to a
deity. The first movement is the expression of the performers yearning for the
deity; the second is the actual call to the deity; and the third is the celebration
of their arrival. The Wiccan invocation in both its verbal and non-verbal
aspects is rather like this. The invoker must want the deity to appear. Then
they must call them; and then they must be pleased to see them. A successful
invocation requires these emotional states to be present in the invoker, and
preferably also verbally expressed in the text of the invocation, to get the
coveners in the mood and participating in the act of invocation.

Similarly, in Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleister Crowley identifies the

process of invocation with the four elements, or the Tetragrammaton:
Fire is the eager prayer of the magician to the deity;
Water is the magician listening to, or catching the reflection of, the deity
Air is the marriage of fire and water, when human and deity have become
one
and Earth is the condensation or materialisation of the three higher
principles

Some of you may remember David Wadsworths classic talk, Kabbalah and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where he likened the four worlds of the
Kabbalah and the four stages of an invocation to the phases of a four-stroke
engine: suck, squeeze, bang, blow. I quote from the maestro himself:

1) Suck: Initially the piston is at the top and both valves are
closed. As the crank shaft turns, the inlet valve opens, the con rod
pulls the piston down which draws air and fuel in. At this point in an
invocation, the invoker is opening his chakras and drawing the cosmic
energy which surrounds us into his body.

2) Squeeze: The crank shaft continues around, the inlet valve shuts, and
the piston is pushed up, squeezing tha gases together. This is
when the invoker says the invocation and passes the power to the
invokee.

3) Bang: The fuel/air mixture ignites and pushes the piston down. The
priest/ess takes on the aspect of God/dess being invoked.

4) Blow: The exhaust valve opens and the piston pushes the charge into
the exhaust pipe. The God/dess charges and shares his/her power with
those assembled.

Also, the invokee must be in a suitably receptive state to receive the deity, and
not be afraid of being possessed or the like; so they must have confidence in
the invoker and in themselves and know that they will be able to de-invoke the
deity at the end of the process. I was taught that learning to be invoked upon
is a gradual process; the first few times, the deity only descends into the top
three chakras or so, and it takes time for them to descend further into the
body.

Personally, I have always objected to the practice of delivering a Charge and

then not allowing the deity to speak through you. There is nothing wrong with
delivering a Charge to get you in the flow, and then allowing the deity to speak
through you, but if you just do a Charge and then stop, its hardly worth the
deity bothering to turn up.

The way I see it, there are five levels of invocation in Wicca.

The first level is the light glamour that occurs when doing cakes and wine. As
the priest kneels before the priestess, he may lightly invoke the Goddess such
that the priestess has an overlay of Goddess energy; or the Goddess energy may
well up from within her. She is then empowered to bless the cakes and wine.
However, there is usually no intention of fully invoking the Goddess here, or
channelling the Goddesss utterances. Similarly, the God may be lightly
invoked on the priest in the blessing of the cakes and wine.

The second level occurs in the rite of Drawing Down the Moon. Here the
Goddess energy is much stronger than in the blessing of cakes and wine, and it
is specifically the Moon Goddess being invoked, but again, we are just
conveying Goddess energy to the other participants in the ritual, rather than
channelling the Goddesss utterances. (Similarly for the newer ritual of
Drawing Down the Sun.) As an aside, some mythologies have Sun Goddesses and
Moon Gods, so there is no need to restrict Drawing Down the Moon to
priestesses, or Drawing Down the Sun to priests.

The third level doesnt have a name, but it feels as if the invoked deity is
standing just behind you and whispering in your ear, and you are translating
what they are saying for the benefit of the rest of the coven. You (the invokee)
and the deity are both standing in the realm of the gods, but they are not fully
in you.

Sometimes the third level happens very briefly as a preparatory phase just
before the fourth level.

The fourth level is where the deity is in you but not intermingled with your
consciousness; its more as if theyre alongside you inside your body, and have
just borrowed your voice to say what they have to say. This level is invocation
proper; but its like one of those executive toys with oil and water in a
transparent chamber, where the oil and water can be shaken up but do not
mix.

The fifth level is where the consciousness of the deity is intermingled or

merged with your consciousness (the oil and water have been shaken up and
formed an emulsion). In this level of invocation, it is difficult to know where
the deity ends and you begin. It feels to me as if they have descended into me
through the top of my head, and I have opened up to receive them. Other
people have told me that it feels as if they have stepped in through their back
(I have also experienced this feeling).
There are further levels of invocation, but they do not seem to be generally
practiced in Wicca.

The sixth level is where your consciousness is entirely displaced, so that the
deity has completely taken over and you dont remember anything about what
happened during the period while the deity was present. I do not think this is a
beneficial practice. This is apparently what happens during a Voudun
possession, and in certain shamanic traditions. In his classic travelogue about
the Caribbean, The Travellers Tree, Patrick Leigh Fermor says that possessed
practitioners retained an awareness of themselves, albeit dimmed; but more
recent accounts by anthropologists and by practitioners themselves have stated
that they did not recall anything that happened during the possession.
Interestingly, practitioners are always ridden by the same lwa in Voudun,
another practice which I do not consider beneficial. Interestingly, the lwa are
said to enter the human body at the base of the skull.

In October 2008, I attended an academic conference in Heidelberg on the

dynamics of ritual. There were five days of talks by anthropologists,
theologians, psychologists, scholars of religion, sociologists and so on. Many of
them were also practitioners of various paths. I attended a strand entitled
The Inner Work of Ritual chaired by Geoffrey Samuel. One of the papers in
this strand was by an anthropologist who had compared shamanic possession
with Tantric Buddhist invocation. The shamanic possession was similar to the
experience of being ridden by the lwa in Voudun the shaman left his body for
the duration of the possession trance.

In Tantric Buddhist practice, however, the practitioner invokes a Buddha or a

deity (such as Tara) and ascends to the realm of the deities (remember that
up and down are just metaphors here). There, the practitioner merges his or
her self with that of the deity, and then goes beyond the deity to the nameless
divine ocean of bliss. This practice solves two problems: the problem outlined
at the beginning of the talk about getting typecast or acquiring the
characteristics of a particular type of deity; and it also means that we can go
deeper and merge with the infinite without losing our awareness in the process.

I have not yet succeeded in attaining the Tantric Buddhist level of invocation,
but I am working on it. Interestingly, Aleister Crowley appears to have
experienced this level, because in Magick in Theory and Practice, he writes:
This consists of a real identification of the magician and the god.
Note that to do this in perfection involves the attainment of a
species of Samadhi; and this fact alone suffices to link
irrefragably magick with mysticism.

Another question we might ask about invocation is whether it is all happening

internally, or whether there is an external consciousness actually entering us.
Patrick Leigh Fermor discusses the dynamics of possession by the lwa. He
suggests that possession works by calling up some unconscious aspect of the self
from the depths of the psyche and allowing it to take over from the ego for a
while. He is sceptical of any external consciousness being involved. However,
the idea of something arising out of the depths of the psyche is a useful one, as
according to Jungian psychology, it is our subconscious that is connected to the
collective unconscious.

It is also worth comparing the Wiccan practice of invocation with that outlined
in Aleister Crowleys Magick in Theory and Practice. Crowley identifies three
main methods of invoking deities. The first is devotion to the deity; the second
is straightforward ceremonial invocation; and the third is to enact a drama of
the deitys legend. He says that in invocation, the macrocosm floods the
consciousness; whereas with evocation, the magician identifies with the
macrocosm and creates a microcosm (the triangle into which the spirit is
evoked).

Crowley outlines six phases of invocation, using the method where the magician
identifies with the deity: First, the magician studies the symbolic form of the
deity and builds up a mental picture, with as much care as the artist would
bestow upon a model. The invocation begins with prayer to the deity,
commemorating their physical attributes, but mindful of the symbolic meaning
of these. Then the magician recites the deitys characteristic utterance, and
then asserts the identity of his or her self with the deity. Then the magician
invokes the deity again, but this time it is as if the deitys will that he or she
should manifest in the magician. Finally, the magician becomes passive, and
then the deity speaks through the magician.

Questions for discussion

How does invocation feel to you?
Where/how does the deity enter?
Has it benefited you?
Any issues with it?
Should you deliver a Charge, or allow the deity to speak through you, or
both?