It may be useful to begin this paper with a couple of definitions; the following are taken from Collins English Dictionary:

The dictionary definitions of Invocation and Evocation indicate that the words are virtually synonymous in common usage. The discernible difference is that invocation implies the use of some sort of incantation or verbal process by the operator, whereas no particular procedure is implied in the case of evocation.

Usage of the terms among magicians has indicated some difference of interpretation about what is involved. For example, Peter Carroll, in various writings, makes distinctions between the two which, in my understanding, differentiate Evocation as the act of manufacturing or summoning some entity which is then set to work on behalf of the magician; while invocation is some ritual process by which an operator assumes the personality of an entity or becomes possessed by it.

Consider a magickal working like that of obtaining discourse with Choronzon using the Enochian Call of the 10th Aethyr, where one operator performs the incantation (i.e. recites the Enochian text) and the other, positioned in some geometrical construct of Art, strives to attain some degree of gnosis to the point where the entity is able to communicate through that mortal basis. In my view such a working includes elements of both Invocation and Evocation, even within the context of definitions which make a clear distinction between the two processes. The operator making the recitation is performing an Evocation, summoning the entity and assigning it a task. Specifically that of occupying and communicating through the second operator, who in turn performs an Invocation, becoming possessed by the entity.

In this type of working it is my view that, if successful, both classes of magickal act are being carried out, and that whether the overall ritual is regarded as an Invocation or as an Evocation depends essentially on the relative viewpoint of the operator.

Whatever the reaction might be to that, perhaps simplistic, view of the phenomenon, there would I think be some common ground in an assertion that there are close parallels between Invocation and Evocation in that those processes both concern direct interaction between an operator and some discorporeal entity of whatever character.

What Are Entities Anyway?

In the literature, something like the Holy Ghost of Christian tradition would fall within the range; this entity purportedly possesses the episcopal delegates to a Church Council, inspiring them, for example, to include certain works of scripture within the canon as the infallible word of God, while declaring others to be heretical. Alternatively any project or relationship between people may be said to have an associated Egregor which encapsulates the abstract or systemic qualities inherent in the physical basis; in between are an infinity of gods, angels, demons, qlipothic shells, and indeed pretty well anything pertaining to the various Astral Planes or whatever other term one cares to apply to non-physical space.

Monotheistic dogmas have always had difficulties with characterising communication to humans from discorporeal entities. If the Chief Constable living in a monotheistic paradigm hears a voice in his head telling him to do something idiotic, he assumes it to be the 'voice of God^', and goes right ahead. If the Yorkshire Ripper, at work in a cemetery, hears a voice in his head telling him to do something idiotic, he assumes it to be the 'voice of God', and goes right ahead. Interpreting sounds in the head as the 'the voice of God' and acting accordingly can be hazardous, but those so moved might respond by asking 'Well if it isn't the Voice of God, what is it?' The following story may be interesting in that context

Doctor Farquharson's Radio

The late Dr Robin Farquharson was one of the most gifted individuals it has ever been my privilege to know. His doctorate for original work on the Theory of Voting ('psephology' as it's called in the trade) was awarded by the University of Oxford in 1958, and he won the Monograph Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for related work in 1961. At the time when I met him in 1968 he had recently been stripped of his post as a Senior Research Fellow ('Don') in Management Studies at Churchill College, Cambridge.

I first encountered him at a meeting of the 'Anti-University'. This was a loose knit structure which operated from a series of short-term addresses. Its primary function was to promote serious academic work into subject areas which were considered to be neglected by conventional Universities.

Among the assembled Anarchist Philosophers, Situationists, Astrologers and Crack-pots there was this eminently respectable gentleman, neatly turned out in a business suit. He presented a complete contrast to the tie-dyed majority of the delegates, and they were a little suspicious of him; Police Spy? CIA Agent? His contributions were succinct and positive however, and I was struck by his ability to cut through the periphera of an issue and apply his thinking to the critical elements. He was a tall man, maybe 6ft 2ins, fortyish with greying, thinning hair and that wild-eyed look which comes across, for example, in some portraits of Beethoven.

Robin's fall from academic grace was occasioned by his mental balance. He writes in the preface to his book Drop Out: "I am a manic-depressive. When I'm up, I have no judgement, but fantastic drive; when I'm down, I have judgement, but no drive at all. In between I pass for normal well enough."

One evening he turned up at the Westbourne Park Road flat which I shared with some friends, carrying a large portable radio receiver under his arm. The door was opened and he seemed agitated. 'You don't trust me,' he said, the speech tumbling out in a flurry.

'You all think I'm a spy. Well, I'll prove to you that I'm not!'

With that he assumed entry. Seated on the floor in the front room he started singing a song loudly; with imperfect pitch, but recognisable. All the while he was fiddling with the tuner dial on the portable radio, but with the set switched off. We couldn't figure out what he was up to, but suddenly he turned the radio on loud and the song he was singing came forth over the airwaves, exactly synchronised with his voice.

He roared with laughter as we scratched our heads, not completely taking in what we were witnessing.

He switched the radio off and lapsed into a learned sounding commentary on a topic of current news interest, all the while twiddling the tuner dial. After a further ten or fifteen seconds he switched the radio on and the commentary programme he had located continued what hewas saying.

Next Robin started speaking in German. He tuned the radio again, switched it on and out it flowed, absolutely contiguous with what he was saying.

'I told you I would prove that I wasn't a spy.'

We thought it was a conjuring trick, some stunt with a tape recorder. But no, he really did appear to have some bizarre ability to pick up radio waves in his head.

In later years, having got to know him better, we occasionally discussed this offbeat talent. He explained that it only occurred infrequently at a particular stage in the progression of his manic state, and it seemed that the drugs administered interfered with it I asked if he had ever done any scientific analysis of the process involved, and he said that he generally kept the ability to himself, because he appreciated the sort of pressures and experimentation he might be subjected to if he admitted it or demonstrated it to the wrong company.

The proof was accepted. There was no way that a spy with that sort of talent could possibly be assigned to check up on the Anti-University or the Human Zoo in Westbourne Park Road.

Robin was delighted and carried on with his party-trick for some hours.

Suddenly he became very sad. He picked up a news flash that Yuri Gagarin, the Russian who was first in space, had died in an air crash. It transpired that Robin had a deep personal admiration for Gagarin and he was genuinely moved by the sudden news. The date was 27th March 1968.

The point of the story is this. Here is a man who suffers occasional bouts of mental imbalance, during the course of which he hears voices and other sounds in his head. Robin Farquharson's insight was to recognise some proportion of them for what they actually represented, that is signals amplitude modulated onto radio frequency electromagnetic waves (this was before Frequency Modulation came into common use).

I have no reason to believe that Robin Farquharson was so extraordinary that his peculiar talent could be unique in human experience, though I am unaware of any description of such a human capability in the scientific literature. If anyone is familiar with any systematic work in this field, perhaps among mental patients, I would be most interested to hear of it, because I feel it gives some interesting pointers to the kind of processes which might be involved in a wide spectrum of phenomena which are usually classified as extra-sensory perception.

We are all aware that information can be transferred from one place to another by modulation of electromagnetic standing waves. I would like you to consider the possibility that information might also be capable of storage or transfer by means of resonance within a toroidal (ring doughnut shaped) structure having an electromagnetic character.

For the purposes of this exercise, the process may be appropriately visualised by consideration of nothing more complicated than a humble smoke-ring. In mathematical terms this is a Torus which has a clearly defined, coherent and self-contained existence for an extended period within a fundamentally chaotic matrix; i.e. it can hang around for several seconds, retaining its structure in the turbulent air of a smoke-filled room. Such ordered structures fall quite naturally out of the Chaos Mathematics which models the behaviour of gasses and liquids (Fluid Dynamics for the technically inclined). Examples of such ordered structures in a chaotic environment abound, and not only on this planet. The great Red Spot on Jupiter, for instance, has been in existence at least since Galileo observed it in 1610, though the chaotic nature of that planet's atmosphere was not appreciated until the flypast of the Voyager spacecraft in 1979.

A perfect smoke-ring requires very little expenditure of energy to be brought into existence, though that energy, in the form of a controlled pulse of gas projected from its creator's lips, has to be quite precise - i.e. smoke-rings don't always work, particularly if someone is watching, and the best ones of all sometimes happen quite by accident! Significantly, the only way an observer can know that a smoke-ring is there is because it has smoke in it. If an identical pulse of gas is projected from the lips by a non-smoker, the toroidal ring structure will be established in just the same way within the atmosphere, but its presence is almost impossible to detect, even with the most sophisticated of scientific instruments.

If a pulse of sound could be 'injected' in some way into the space enclosed by such a toroid, it is interesting to speculate about what might happen to it. The possibility that it would travel round and round the ring as if steered in a wave-guide by the boundaries of the structure cannot entirely be ruled out.

It is my submission that it is mathematically possible for toroidal structures of an electromagnetic character to exist within the chaotic matrix of the earth's magnetic field or magnetosphere. Proving the objective existence of such 'magneto-toroidal smoke-rings' would be no easier than proving the existence of a 'smoke-ring' blown by a non-smoker, but there is nothing in the Axioms of Maths and Laws of Physics which would rule them out. Chaos Maths as applied to fluid dynamics would even suggest to me that such a structure might be expected, and one method by which it might be brought into being would be by means of a sudden electrochemical pulse through a human-being's nervous system. Precisely this sort of event might occur at the point where a shaman enters a state of gnosis, with the internal activity being transferred to the surrounding magnetosphere by a process akin to Faraday induction. In physical terms the amounts of energy may be very small, but so they are in the case of creating an atmospheric smoke-ring; it is technique (or luck) which brings the best specimens into existence.

What Happens During Invocation/Invocation?

After that theoretical digression I would like to examine the sort of experiences which operators report during and after experiments with the processes of invocation and evocation.

Operators who have taken manifestations of entities frequently report some degree of amnesia about the actual possession phase of the working. Subjectively, attempts to recall what has happened are a little like what is experienced on being suddenly awoken from a dream. There are snap shot recollections of parts of the experience, but much of the detail and sequence of what has occurred cannot easily be recalled. At the onset of the manifestation it feels as if something is coming in from the outside, but logically it seems more probable that some element of the subconscious mind takes over control of the operator's motor functions, and that there may be some enhancement of receptive or intuitive faculties.

One of the most peculiar phenomena observed during this class of working is the apparent acquisition by the operator of detailed information on subjects about which s/he has no sentient knowledge. This is one of the features of these workings which has led in the past to an assumption that some sort of divine or diabolical intelligence must be involved. It has been consistently observed however that such detailed information may represent a resynthesis of material about which one of the other people present may have specialist knowledge. It almost seems as if some latent telepathic faculty is enhanced as part of the invocation process, and that information emanating from the entity may be telepathically 'down-loaded' from other people in the vicinity.

Something similar may happen during spiritualist medium sessions, where operators are frequently able to relate stunningly accurate personal details of subjects in their audience, apparently without any fraud or collusion being involved.

Having illustrated above how, under certain circumstances, the human mind can be sensitive to amplitude modulated electromagnetic (radio) waves, I would venture to suggest that this sensing ability can also extend to information transferred by some process involving the sort of magneto-toroidal structures outlined above. Some corroboration of this hypothesis would seem to be provided by the results of scientific evaluations of telepathy which appear to show that the incidence of successful information transfer decreases when one of the participants is surrounded by an electromagnetic screen or Faraday Cage.

Another imponderable which blights experiments into telepathy is the fact that it does not always seem to work, and, particularly, that the instance of success seems to decrease when the matter is being systematically investigated. Within the magneto-toroidal hypothesis put forward here, I would point back to an obvious parallel with atmospheric smoke-rings. They don't happen perfectly every time, and it is more difficult to get them right if there are spectators; moreover the best ones of all seem to happen quite by accident

It is unfortunate, in my view, that much of the emphasis of experimental work into this field has been to assume that if the phenomena being investigated are seen to be real, then there must be some fundamental challenge to the Axioms of Mathematics and/or the Laws of Physics. Since outcomes which appear to contradict these paradigms are generally deemed unacceptable by reputable academics, there has generally been some pressure to demonstrate that people who can successfully manifest psychic abilities must be indulging in some sort of elaborate fraud or deception. This in turn has led to some reluctance on the part of those who have noticed that they have such abilities to offer themselves as subjects for sensible experiments; no one wants to co-operate with experimenters and then, when successes are scored, to wind up being accused of some sort of fraud! It's easier just to keep silence.

The magneto-toroidal hypothesis, although absolutely non-rigorous at this protean stage of it's development, does seem to offer a mechanism which would appear to provide a causal explanation of the kind of things which are observed to happen, but without overturning the axioms beloved of rational science.

Turning now to Evocation in Peter Carroll's sense of a process by which a magician summons up a pre-named entity, or brings a new one into existence by some process of 'psycho-facture', and then externalises it, often with the intention of provoking some alteration to objective reality in accordance with a willed outcome, or enchantment

My submission is that what the magician or shaman is actually doing is creating some mental image of what is summoned, perhaps in combination with some visualisation of the willed outcome, then with the attainment of some gnostic state, or with a sudden pulse of nervous system activity, such as an orgasm or a martial-arts-style KIAI, s/he projects this neural pattern into the surrounding matrix.

Some things seem to be much easier to accomplish than others, to any degree of consistency and repeatability, when using magickal methods. In normal waking life most people are able to describe something 'magickal' which has happened to them. The majority of these events tend to be in the realm of extra-ordinary co-incidences; 'million-to-one' chances. These are the natural stuff of Chaos. On the downside it will hardly have escaped notice that the incidence of million-to-one events leading to systems failures, for example in nuclear power installations, seem to occur a lot more frequently than they ought to. Any and all complex systems seem to be prone to these sort of manifestations of Chaos.

It would be my assertion, in concurrence with the view of many Chaos Magicians, that co-incidence manipulation is one of the areas of activity which can most effectively be exploited by magickal techniques. It is also one of the most difficult to pin down in terms of whether any given outcome was the result of some magickal activity intended to produce that outcome, or whether it would have happened anyway.

For example, if a magician has a legitimate dispute with a very large multi-national company and advertises that s/he is going to perform a working to their detriment in a public park, and the companies major shareholder is promptly over-run by some Chaos out of Babylon,precipitating a drop in their share price to some 50% of its level prior to the public working, who is to say that it would not have happened anyway? The only basis on which a valid assertion of magickal influence might be made is where the intended outcome was openly proclaimed in advance. Even so, those who choose to believe that there is no such thing as magick will say that it represents nothing more than coincidence, but the magician could claim to have manipulated that natural co-incidence into occurrence.

It is worth interjecting at this point that there may be advantages to magicians in assuming a philosophical position which supports the contention that all such juxtaposed events are the result of nothing more than natural co-incidence. It is, after all, nigh impossible to legislate against natural co-incidence.

A collection of Frater Choronzon's essays is available as a 'samizdat' book entitled Liber Cyber available price £7.50 from Nuit Isis.

REFERENCES:

Carroll, P                  Liber Null (IOT) 1980

                                Psychonaut (Sorcerer's Apprentice) 1981

Choronzon, Fra          Magical Combat - The Corporate Adversary 1990 (Thanateros Journal #2;                                                                                                                Atlanta, Ga, USA)

                                So-called Magic or Fraud or Bullshit (Philos-o-Forum, Greenwich) 1990

Farquharson R.          Drop Out (Anthony Blond) 1968

                                 Theory of Voting (Blackwell) 1969

Gleik, J                      Chaos 1987

Hines, T.                    Pseudo-science & The Paranormal (Prometheus) 1988

Hofstadter, D              Gödel, Escher, Bach (Penguin) 1979

Illuminates of Thanateros Liber Bootleg Tape (Audiogothica) 1990

Regardie, I.                The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic (Falcon) 1984

Vinci, Leo                  Gmicalzoma - An Enochian Dictionary (Regency) 1976