SUMMONING SPIRITS: From Mind to Monster

Here is my main opposition to all these “wizards” who fall out of bed and accidentally conjure Amdusias, or mutter a few spooky words, and poof there is Alloces sitting high upon his steed.

A brief talk with any serious practitioner will bring you to your senses as to the monumental amount of preparation and grueling work that is required to properly instill the specifics of the spiritual creature being conjured into one’s psyche. This involves a long, arduous, and repetitive process of ritually disinhibiting the temporal lobe, particularly the left temporoparietal junction, and then creating the appropriate internal platform from which such a presence may be experienced at all.

When I use the term spiritual creature, I am not referring to an external folkloric being wandering about some invisible realm waiting to be summoned like a trained animal. I am referring to an experienced presence, a structured encounter with an archetypal agency that emerges through disciplined ritual work and altered states of consciousness. These presences are not imagined in the casual sense, nor are they independent entities in the naive supernatural sense. They are internally generated experiences that possess autonomy, personality, and a sense of otherness precisely because they arise from layers of the psyche normally inaccessible to waking consciousness.

The left temporoparietal junction is especially relevant because it plays a critical role in agency detection, self and other distinction, and the attribution of intention. When this region is disinhibited, the brain becomes far more likely to experience thoughts, impulses, and symbolic material as originating from an other rather than from the self. This shift is not random malfunction but a predictable alteration in how the mind assigns authorship and presence. Ritual work exploits this mechanism deliberately and methodically.

Ritual, in this context, is not a means of producing hallucinations in the crude or pathological sense. Rather, it is a method of altering attribution. It systematically shifts how meaning, agency, and intentionality are assigned to internal phenomena. The practitioner does not simply see things. Previously unconscious structures are encountered as autonomous presences because the normal cognitive filters that insist this is only me have been temporarily and intentionally suspended.

Aleister Crowley, at the time, held a unique view of the Goetic spirits. Instead of treating them as independently existing beings, he understood them as aspects of the human mind. Carl Jung would later arrive at a compatible conclusion through depth psychology. Crowley believed these aspects could be approached, controlled, and integrated through prolonged ritual preparation. By commanding a specific spiritual creature or current, one could tap into a corresponding region of the unconscious and access an archetypal structure, potentially gaining occult knowledge in the true sense of the word hidden.

Crowley’s view was ahead of its time. Long before depth psychology provided a formal vocabulary for such ideas, he recognized that these entities functioned as distinct psychic forces, not because they were fictional, but because they operated autonomously within the psyche. Jung’s later work does not contradict this position. It clarifies it.

Back in the old days, Neolithic to be exact, holes were drilled into the skull to let out the demons. This practice is known as trepanning. While anatomically misguided, it reflects an intuitive recognition that altered states of consciousness are linked to encounters with perceived nonhuman agencies. They were not entirely off base in principle. The brain’s temporal lobe is the primary gateway through which referenced material from other regions of the mind is released into conscious experience. This material appears in the form of what are often labeled psychic or spiritual phenomena, including out of body experiences, near death experiences, alien abductions, past life memories, the god phenomenon, and the summoning of demons and angels.

Carl Jung discovered that an encounter with the demon or monster represents an archetypal stage in the process of individuation. The initial encounter with the Self casts a dark shadow ahead of time. The shadow presents itself as a monster, a demon, a darkness, or a drought. As Jung writes in Man and His Symbols:

“Many myths and fairy tales symbolically describe this initial stage in the process of individuation by telling of a king who has fallen ill or grown old. Other familiar story patterns are that a royal couple is barren, or that a demon keeps the king’s army or his ship from proceeding on its course, or that darkness hangs over the lands, wells dry up, and flood, drought, and frost afflict the country. Thus it seems as if the initial encounter with the Self casts a dark shadow ahead of time, or as if the inner friend comes at first like a trapper to catch the helplessly struggling ego in his snare.”

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 167

In this light, the demon is not an enemy to be banished, but the first form in which the Self is encountered, appearing as monstrous precisely because the ego is not yet capable of integrating what it faces.

Demonic presences, which are the shadows of the repressed mind, are a normal and natural consequence of temporal lobe disinhibition. Some institutionalized temporal lobe psychotics experience daily communications with spiritual entities. However, if such experiences intrude uncontrollably into ordinary waking life, a psychiatric evaluation is warranted. Pathology is characterized by involuntary intrusion. Ritual summoning is defined by control, containment, and intentionality.

If we are deliberately disinhibiting the temporal lobe through prolonged ritual work, then occasional visitors are not only possible but expected. Prolonged is the operative word. Those who have genuinely committed to this Work understand that creating the conditions necessary for meaningful contact with an archetypal structure requires an extremely long, focused, rigorous, and disciplined process. This process may involve hours, days, weeks, or months of sustained effort aimed at quieting the objective mind and engaging the subjective.

Unfortunately, even after days of ritual work, there is still a slim chance of communication. Not even the most gifted or experienced magician can mutter a few Latin or Sumerian phrases and expect anything beyond self deception. A controlled method of disinhibiting the left temporoparietal junction requires discipline, repetition, endurance, and the willingness to confront silence.

What passes for summoning in popular occult culture is little more than theatrical fantasy. Words without preparation, symbols without sacrifice, and expectation without discipline. Real Work does not announce itself with spectacle or obedient spirits arriving on command. It is slow, isolating, mentally exhausting, and often unrewarding. It demands prolonged ritual conditioning, neurological endurance, and the willingness to confront aspects of the psyche that resist being known. Those who mistake incantation for initiation will experience nothing beyond their own projections. Those who commit to the Work may still experience nothing at all, and that too is part of the discipline. This is the line that separates fantasy magic from real summoning. Not belief. Not bravado. But time, rigor, and the capacity to endure silence without self-deception.

Etu Malku

Preceptor of The Order 0f Iblīs

Musiqal Director at The Sect 0f the Horned God

Neurotheology (BSc level studies)