incantation
An incantation is understood to mean both a pleading or vehemently made request to a fellow human being or to a higher being, as well as the summoning and making use of supernatural beings. Most of the time the incantation is carried out by remembering a promise or an oath . In Grimoires incantations are recorded in writing.
Mainly the invocation is the calling or spiritual creation of spirits , mythical creatures , supernatural creatures or certain events. Widespread is the evocation of a deceased person in a séance by means of a medium , a person sunk in a trance who is said to have good contacts with the realm of spirits . With the emergence of spiritualism at the end of the 19th century , it was mostly charlatans and deceivers that stood out here. The famous magician Harry Houdini made the fight against deceitful necromancers his life's work. Alfred Hitchcock used the motif of deception by an alleged medium in his film Family Grave .
Incantation rites found and are to be found in different forms in almost every culture and religion . In most of the original religions, which are animistic and which have spiritual specialists , the conjuring of supernatural spirits plays a role, but also in magically oriented religions such as Bon , partly Daoism or Voodoo .
According to popular belief , it was believed that paraphernalia , dances and gestures and spoken incantations could summon demons and make them usable. This sometimes results in so-called victims in the form of animals, blood or the burning of food and objects.
In Islam , for example, there is the jinn that can be conjured up or driven away. In Christianity , prayers are used to invoke divine assistance. But conjurations of personalized demons of illness were often used in the past since monastic medicine .
occultism
Conjuration, evocation (Latin evocatio = calling out) or the practice of occultism refers to a magical practice in which a spirit is to be conjured up.
In traditional magic , this is a cultic and ritual act of ritual magic . The conjuring up of spiritual beings is a belief: From a modern scientific point of view, these spiritual beings do not exist and at most have a psychological relevance.
The expression evocation is attested in the religious literature of late antiquity, for example in Titus Livius , Pliny the Elder (Naturalis historia 24,160), Macrobius etc.
The evocation was originally intended to draw the gods of the enemy into the Roman ranks in armed conflicts and consisted of a formula (spoken by the priest), sacrifice and curse ( devotion ), as well as the sacrifice of black sheep. Even in times of peace, evocation had its place in the life of the Roman Empire .
In the practice of western occult evocation, the person performing the ritual is in a "protective circle" drawn beforehand. The spirit being intended to be summoned is to be made to manifest itself in a “magic triangle” located outside the circle. For this purpose traditional "magic seals" or sigils , the names of the spirit being, as well as magical correspondence, i.e. H. Allocations of symbol systems used.
In contrast to the invocation , in which the practitioner pursues the idea of achieving a union with a called spiritual being, the intention of the evocation is to bring the being from its imagined sphere into the world that is visible to the human being. The supposed spirit beings that are summoned are diverse, e.g. B. elemental beings , gods , planetary beings , angels or demons.
This magical practice is supposed to serve very different purposes of the performers. The users believe that they can serve to make spirits subservient to themselves, to gain their protection, to enter into a pact (as in Goethe's Faust. A Tragedy. ) Or to gain knowledge of the corresponding being. Similar ideas play a role in the incantation rituals of the various religions.
Well-known representatives of the evocation ideas include Agrippa von Nettesheim , Aleister Crowley , Franz Bardon , Israel Regardie , Kenneth Grant and Peter Carroll .
The esotericist Rudolf Steiner practiced necromancy and later tried, in his anthroposophical time, to distance himself from it by reinterpreting his attempts to contact the dead as "spiritual views".
Summoning of disease demons in the Middle Ages
In the so-called monastic medicine of the Middle Ages , besides the pious blessings in which God was asked for help, personalized illnesses were invoked and conjured as demons.
For example: the worm evocation “gang uz nesso” since the 10th century, the evocation of the wandering uterine toad “I conjure you, white-black-green-yellow matrix, diabolical, unchaste as you are” also since the 10th century. Century, the evocation of the plague "I conjure you, gland and ulcer " and the expulsion of the elves and alpine spirits in the so-called Munich night blessing of the 14th century.
These ancient texts are almost always entered in the Codices alongside practical medical measures (ointments, herbs, surgical interventions) and were used as suggestive accompanying therapy for doctors, as an early form of Christian-archaic “ psychotherapy ”, from whose texts up to derives a plethora of popular healing sayings into modern times.
Incantations in literature
The subject of conjuration is used in many horror stories as well as in numerous grimoires . Countless scripts of horror films also use the topos .
See also
literature
- Franz Bardon: The Practice of Magical Evocation. 11th edition, Bauer-Verlag, Freiburg 2000.
- Helmut Birkhan : Magic in the Middle Ages. Beck 2010.
- Willy Louis Braekman: Middelnederlandse zegeningen, bezweringsformulate en toverplanten. In: Verslagen en mededelingen of the Koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde. 1963, pp. 275-386.
- Wolfgang Ernst: Incantations and blessings. Applied psychotherapy in the Middle Ages. Böhlau, Cologne / Vienna / Weimar 2011.
- Wolfgang Ernst: brain and magic. Archaic and medieval psychoperformative healing texts and their natural active components. Frankfurt u. a. 2013.
- John Michael Greer: Encyclopedia of Secret Doctrines. Munich 2005.
- Irmgard Hampp: incantation - blessing - prayer. Studies on magic from the field of folk medicine. Stuttgart 1961 (= publications of the State Office for Monument Preservation Stuttgart , C, 1).
- Jozef von Haver: Nederlandse incantatieliteratuur. A commented compendium of Nederlandse bezweringsformules. Ghent 1964 (= Koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde, VI e reeks: bekroonde werken. Volume 94).
- Frank Müller: The occult incantations. Collection of various incantation rituals to acquire occult powers. Jaspers 2010.
- Bernd-Christian Otto: Magic: Reception and discourse history analyzes from antiquity to modern times. De Gruyter 2011.
- Wolfgang Schramm: A Compendium of Sumerian-Akkadian Incantations. Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2008.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Miriam Gebhardt : Rudolf Steiner. A modern prophet. DVA, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-421-04473-0 . P. 110.