How to Work with Invocation in Your Circle of Eight
Invocations are usually made near the start of a ceremony. In an invocation, you call out to an energy, being, or characteristic that you wish to be present for the ritual or working. In this way, elements can be invoked, gods and goddesses, spirits or energies, or even places or other people who are not physically present. I prefer not to invoke the elements, reasoning that they are already present; an acknowledgment works better, especially an acknowledgment of how the element appears on this occasion. The word invocation implies bringing something present that wasn’t there originally.
Viewed this way, invocation becomes a more complex subject, and perhaps what we are really talking about is always acknowledgment: bringing our awareness to different aspects of deity and energy that are always present everywhere, but when they receive our attention and honoring they come into the forefront of our minds and thus take a stronger part in our ritual. Invocation, however, is the commonly used term and the one I am using here.
Invocations and acknowledgments are usually made aloud, although not always. They can be done silently using movement, dance, or inner focus, and they can be done with music: drum, other instrument, or voice. They can be made by one person, several people, or by the whole group. Usually different invocations are carried out by different people, so if you were invoking the ancestors, the Goddess, and the God, three different people or different sets of people would make those invocations. You can invoke from the perimeter of the circle—this is commonly done for elements and directions—or from the center.
I experience invocations as powerful when they rise up through the person and express themselves spontaneously through movement, words, and sound. I like to see the Horned Lord in the scraping of someone’s feet, their shifting shoulders and lift of the head, and hear something of his power in their voice. Invocations that are prewritten, in verse, or read off a piece of paper don’t do it for me. I have heard powerful invocations in ceremonial magic that were committed to memory and recited; the difference being, I think, that those people had deeply related to and worked with the words and concepts, so the invocations still arrived through the vehicle of their own emotions and experience as they called out the words.
In a geographic Circle of Eight, the places themselves may be invoked—called to—in ritual, to presence them at wherever the ritual is taking place. This is usually done facing outwards, into the direction, sending an energetic thread from the ritual to the place. Depending on the working, there also may be other invocations. The essence of any invocation is communication. The person invoking is communicating on an internal and bodily level with what they are invoking, as well as with the other people present, to convey to them a living sense of what is being invoked. They are a medium, a channel, and their focus, intention, and embodiment will make the difference between an effective invocation and one that doesn’t quite convince or convey a sense of what is being called to.
How to Work with Invocations
There are both technical and energetic considerations to take into account when invoking. Practicing invocations before the ritual begins can be useful to adjust things such as the volume of people’s voices and the length of the invocations. Devoting part of one circle meeting purely to practicing and working with invocations is a great way of focusing everyone’s attention on this part of creating magic and means your group will learn to work well together and pass seamlessly from one to another when making a series of invocations. This also helps when everyone is facing outwards to invoke the eight directions and so is not able to easily see each other, relying instead on vocal cues for when one person has finished and it’s the next person’s turn.
Technical Considerations
• Volume. About half the invocations I’ve ever witnessed in ritual can’t be heard by most of the people there. Some people may need a lot of encouragement to raise their voices to the volume where they can be easily heard by the entire group. Vocal, singing, and breath exercises can all offer support for everyone to learn to use their voice effectively. Speaking loudly enough when your back is to the group is particularly challenging.
• Length. Keeping all the invocations roughly similar in length adds to the cohesion of the overall ritual. Invocations can be too brief to get a sense of what’s being called to and, more often, can be so long that the energy dies out of them and is lost. Having a clear agreement of how long invocations should be—for example, about three sentences—will help with consistency.
• Content. It’s certainly possible to call to the Goddess and list a hundred or so of her attributes, but is it relevant to the ritual you’re about to do? Prior to the ritual, think carefully about the invocations and the point of inviting or presencing each thing you are calling to. What is their function in this ritual? Tailor your invocations towards that.
• Relevance. Some people like to invoke the ancestors. Some the fey. Some Kali, or Hermes; fire or undying spirit. Of course they are all wonderful things and beings to invoke and be aware of; but do they have a part in your ritual? If they don’t, they’re probably better left for a different time. It could be like asking someone to a tea party and then sticking them in a corner and forgetting to serve them anything or introduce them to anyone. If you’re lucky, they’ll just feel ignored…
Energetic Considerations
• Style. Calling to fire in the same voice that you would use for water, or calling to the East in the same voice as you’d use for West, is not effective. The style and manner in which each invocation is made should represent what is being called to. Thus the fire invocation could be sparking or a ferocious roar, it could be glowing with warmth or leaping up and down, but it should not be dripping, pouring, or monotonal.
• Embodiment. Sometimes this is shown purely through hand movements; other times, the whole body is involved. All levels can be used to embody an invocation: on or near the ground, the mid-range we usually interact at, and above the head, arms reaching up and head thrown back. Let your invocation into your body—let yourself dance with air or stamp the ground with earth.
• Intention. Spending some time before the invocation—at least half an hour but preferably a few days—knowing this is the invocation you will be making allows you to drop more deeply into the feel of what you will be invoking and how to do this. You may choose to acknowledge what you will be invoking on your own altar, in your journal, or another way. It’s like introducing yourself to a guest before introducing them to the whole party; it’s polite, and it gives you some material to work with.
• Intuition. However carefully prepared you are, the real invocation is the one that happens in the ritual. Be open to how it feels in the moment; if you feel an impulse to lower your voice, sweep your arms around, or change some of the words you thought you’d say, trust this intuition. You can experiment—maybe as a group—responding to these intuitions, and see what difference it makes.
How to Invoke Geographic Directions
in the Circle of Eight
Note: Detailed instructions on casting a circle, releasing a circle, and turning the wheel in a Circle of Eight are in the appendix.
1. Stand in the direction and anchor yourself there. Feel its resonance through your feet and entire body.
2. Turn to face the direction, so your back is to the center of the circle, and take some deep breaths. You can imagine that these breaths are bringing the air of your directional place into your body.
3. Name the place or the direction aloud—whatever has been decided by the group earlier. Then begin speaking in a voice you are channeling through the direction—so it is literally using your breath but coming from that geographic place in your Circle of Eight—and speak either of its qualities that you are presencing for the ritual or of the place as you see, imagine, and remember it, bringing it to life for those listening.
4. Finish with your agreed words or signal; it works best if this is the same for each invocation as a clear punctuation between one invocation and the next. This could be a drum beat, a simple sentence such as To the South-West I call! or an honoring: We thank the South-West for its presence.
5. Remain facing in that direction until all remaining directions have been called.
6. Turn together, all at once, and face the center. Now is the time to invoke Above, Below, and Center if you are going to do so. It’s particularly effective if you all turn in the same direction—anticlockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.