Ritual history
Invocation and evocation name changing acts of address whose divine or spiritual targets differ across languages, texts, and centuries.
Useful terms, unstable boundaries
Writers today often use “invocation” for calling a power inward or calling upon it, and “evocation” for calling a being to appear. Historical books do not always maintain that tidy division. The Folger’s sixteenth-century grimoire is described as containing invocations and instructions for summoning spirits; it mixes prayer, conjuration, images, and practical aims. The Key of Solomon and the Goetia use their own vocabularies and assumptions. A term therefore needs to be read in a particular sentence rather than imposed as a universal classification. The distinction that does remain helpful is between what a historical source instructs a person to say, what a participant reported experiencing, and what evidence survives independently. Repeating an instruction from a manuscript does not establish that the promised event happened. It tells us how the writer imagined a communicative encounter.
Who is addressed, and with what authority?
In a ritual passage, the addressee might be God, an angel, a named spirit, a saint, or another figure. The same passage may ask for aid, issue a command, recite a psalm, or invoke a higher name to authorize an address to a lower being. Such combinations are a feature of the texts, not a mistake to be corrected into a modern category. Dee’s records show another form of claimed communication: dated sessions with Edward Kelley, preserved as conversations rather than a simple recipe. Comparing these materials reveals different narrative forms and different expectations about the speaker’s role. It also makes apparent why the words “contact” or “summoning” are insufficient by themselves. The details of a manuscript’s audience, language, and religious setting shape what those terms meant to its author.
A calling passage is a sequence, not a label
In many ceremonial texts the decisive distinction lies inside the speech. A passage may open by addressing God, move through divine names that authorize the speaker, identify an angel or spirit by office, make a request or command, demand a sign of compliance, and end with a dismissal. “Invocation” cannot describe every stage equally well. The Heptameron makes the ladder especially clear: changing calendar names are placed in the circle, an angel of the day or hour is identified, and a longer conjuration grounds the address in higher authority. Dee’s diaries reverse the literary form. They record questions, answers, pauses, and corrections after a session has begun rather than presenting one ideal speech that should always work. Comparing the two shows how genre changes agency. The manual makes the human reader the speaker following a prepared script; the diary makes Dee the examiner and Kelley the reporter of an unfolding exchange. Both concern communication, but their internal sequences distribute authority and uncertainty differently.
What different encounter records preserve
A dated diary, a ritual instruction, a later memoir, and a critic’s retrospective account preserve different evidence about a claimed encounter. Dee’s surviving notebooks contain named participants and reported speech, while later copies and editions introduce further stages of transmission. The Folger grimoire is a material manuscript with annotations and missing leaves. People could take such practices seriously and still disagree about what they had encountered. These records support claims about texts, beliefs, and historical participants; they do not establish a guaranteed channel of communication or settle metaphysical questions. Their form also shapes their evidence. A diary can show revisions, interruptions, and recurring participants; an instruction presents an ideal sequence; a memoir reorganizes events through later memory. Reading those forms together reveals how an encounter was narrated and transmitted. The most useful questions are consequently grammatical and structural: who speaks each clause, which superior name authorizes it, what response is requested, and whether the source records an instruction, a claimed event, or a later recollection.
Questions to explore
- Does this source describe a proposed rite or a reported event?
- Who is the actual addressee of each speech?
- Which manuscript or edition preserves the wording?