Evocation

By an incantation one understands both a pleading or also vehemently presented request to a fellow human being or to a higher being as well as the summoning and making serviceable of supernatural beings. Usually the incantation is performed by remembering a promise or an oath. In grimoires incantations are recorded in writing.

Mainly is considered as summoning or spiritual creation of spirits, mythical creatures, supernatural creatures or even certain events. Widespread is the summoning of a deceased in a séance by means of a medium, a person immersed in a trance, who allegedly has good contacts with the realm of the spirits. With the rise of spiritualism at the end of the 19th century, charlatans and frauds mostly excelled in this field. The famous magician Harry Houdini made it his life's work to fight fraudulent spirit charmers. Alfred Hitchcock used the motif of deception by an alleged medium in his film Family Grave.

Invocation rites were and are found in different forms in almost every culture and religion. In most of the original religions, which are animistic and have spiritual specialists, the summoning of supernatural spirits plays a role, but also in magically oriented religions such as the Bön, partly Daoism or Voodoo.

According to popular belief, paraphernalia, dances and gestures, and spoken incantations were believed to summon demons and harness them. This sometimes involves so-called sacrifices in the form of animals, blood or the burning of food and objects.

In Islam, for example, there is the djinni, which can be summoned or driven away. In Christianity, prayers are used to invoke divine assistance. But also invocations of personalized disease demons were used in the past often since the monk's medicine.

Summoning of disease demons in the Middle Ages

In the so-called monastic medicine of the Middle Ages, in addition to the pious blessings in which God was asked for help, personalized diseases were also invoked and conjured up as demons.

For example: the worm incantation "gang uz nesso" since the 10th century, the incantation of the wandering uterus toad "I conjure thee, white, black, green, yellow matrix, devilish, unchaste, as thou art" also since the 10th century, the incantation of the plague "I conjure thee, gland and boil" and the expulsion of the elves and alp 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 served as suggestive accompanying therapy for physicians as well, as an early form of Christian archaic "psychotherapy", from whose texts an abundance of healing sayings that have become popular is derived up to modern times.

See also

• Exorcism
• Druid
• Goëtie
• Spell
• List of magical writings
• Dhikr