Recently, someone asked me about the differences between invoking, evoking, summoning, banishing, and all that jazz. As a ceremonial magician, there’s a lot of different ritual I use depending on the need that can fall under different categories, each with a different label. Then again, much of the ritual is fluid enough to defy categories or change between them with the use of a few different words. So, let me clarify my stance (and only mine, I dunno how much others may agree with me on this) on the difference between the following words: invocation, evocation, conjuration, summoning, exorcism, banishment. After all, I seem to be doing so well with clarifying my use of particular words, so why not?
Let me clarify first that much of the distinction drawn between these words is strictly a modern thing. Traditional sources and grimoires from the medieval and Renaissance eras made no distinction between invoking and evoking, and used these terms interchangeably with conjuring and exorcising. Because humanity likes to bin and classify everything endlessly, drawing the thickest lines between the smallest groups, and because we’ve inherited a knack for classification from our Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical forefathers, we insist on making these distinctions known. In my practice, I tend to stick to the broadest, most applicable words used, mostly because these categories are strictly artificial and not always replicable in magical practice. Ultimately, when working with the spirits, shit either gets done or it doesn’t. This isn’t engineering where we can always follow the same procedures to obtain the same results, because magic doesn’t work like that, more often than not.
First, let’s talk about the high-level word “conjuration“. It comes from Latin, literally meaning “swearing together”. In a conjuration, one makes a pact, agreement, or oath with one or more spirits (or other brand of non-physical entity, that kind of classification can be talked about in a later post). The oath taken can be just a simple request or a trade of services (you do/give X for me, I do/give Y for you), or something more complicated such as appearing physically in the name of some higher power. In this sense, “conjuration” is the most general term to be used for any work with spirits. A similar term is “adjuration“, or “swearing to”, often used to force a spirit to accomplish or do something. This is a little more forceful and heavy-handed, and is often used in some of the more traditional Catholic or Solomonic rituals to really bind a spirit to the magician’s will.
Similar to conjuration, the word “exorcism” also means “binding by oath”. It comes from Greek through Latin, originally meaning “to cause to swear”. Even as late as the Renaissance period, this word was used in the same way as “conjuration” to refer to any ritual where one works with a spirit under some oath, pact, or agreement. However, as most of these rituals were historically done to get rid of spirits, “exorcism” eventually picked up the meaning of “conjuration so as to banish”. Since a lot of ritual texts from the Renaissance use “exorcism” and “conjuration” interchangeably, I also consider “exorcism” to be a very high-level broad term though with connotations or implications of getting rid of something.
Speaking of, let’s talk about what “banishment” is. This is probably the most agreed-upon term of the bunch, and is also the only one of the bunch that has a Germanic origin instead of a Greek or Latin one. ”Banishment” is getting rid of spirits or other entities or energies, depending on your view of magic and models thereof. Whether this is from one’s own personal sphere or internal world, or from one’s external surroundings and a given place, “banishment” gets rid of, clears out, and bars the entry of spirits into a particular area. Simple enough, I think, though some people would align “exorcism” to be a kind of banishment; in these cases, “banishing” refers to cleansing one’s sphere and inner world, while “exorcism” is clean an external area or person. This is certainly a modern meaning of the words, but are fairly interchangeable.
On the other hand, we have the words “summoning“, “invocation“, and “evocation” to refer to rituals that introduce or call up spirits in a particular area. Of them, “summoning” is the broadest, and refers to calling on any spirit for a particular need; we summon them, they’re present, and then stuff gets done either with or without a charge or pact that would be signified with “conjuration”. After that, we have “invocation” and “evocation” as two different kinds of summoning, or as synonyms for it. Going by etymology, the former means “call in” while the latter means “call out”. Still, more than any other set of terms, these were never seen as different in traditional texts. I can’t stress this enough: any distinction that might be drawn between them is (as far as I’m aware) purely a modern thing. Even if it’s a useful distinction for some people to make in theory, it’s ultimately not that big a deal or a difference in practice.
The difference lies in the use of the prefix “in-” versus “e(x)-”. Some people might distinguish the difference in “invoke” versus “evoke”, especially in non-magical contexts, as a “calling upon a higher power for aid” versus a “calling forth or summoning”. In magical settings, one might invoke a god for aid but evoke a spirit for a conjuration, perhaps invoking a god to swear by. Alternatively, one might invoke a power to buff one’s sphere out or imbue oneself with the blessings of a particular spirit, but would evoke a spirit to accomplish things external to one’s sphere and body. However, this isn’t always the case; the Roman notion of evocation was to call on the gods of an enemy city to abandon them and come to the side of the Romans for aid, which would normally fall under the notion of invoking enemy gods. Similarly, the old myths have various instances of people invoking the gods for aid and then having the gods appear next to them or otherwise manifest for their external aid, which would often be considered evocation. Depending on what one expects and one’s magical background, the same ritual might work to produce internal results, external results, or some combination of the two. As a rule of thumb, one pulls power through an invocation and pulls out spirits through evocation, but this is still a very rough rule that has a lot of exceptions.
Like I mentioned, magical ritual can produce a wide variety of results; there is no laboratory setting or control group to measure effects against, and different people may perceive different effects resulting from the same act. The old authors and magicians didn’t see much of a difference between many of the terms, and used yet others that we’ve largely forgotten or don’t like anymore (such as “karcist” from Fr.MC’s “Crossed Keys”, or to a lesser extent “exorcist” from any number of old grimoires that have a particularly strong Christian bent). There are two primary ways of working with spirits: having them come to you in some way or having them leave you in some way. The specific ritual in question might accomplish either of these aims in any number of ways, depending on tradition or philosophy, but that’s pretty much it. These categories of ritual simply don’t hold up for any but the most rigidly defined and limited of magical practices, and don’t accomplish much on their own. I feel like this is a debate for people who study magic more than practice it, anyway.
