Throwing The Spirits Down the Stairs…

I had the great pleasure this week to spend three hours with an old friend talking about my new book, Consorting With Spirits. Well, we talked a little about the book at least, the rest of the time was spent gabbing about community, business tactics, general magic, and old times.

Tiffany asked me why I have a chapter on friendly conjuration and another chapter on compelling conjurations. Why both? How do you choose? Don’t most people advocate for one or the other?

I thought for a minute and used an example from our lives. “Remember that party where Jeff, Matt, and I threw someone out of the apartment and down three flights of stairs? It’s like that.” She instantly remembered the time when someone, who shall remain nameless, got violent at a party in Philadelphia that my roommate and I hosted. We grabbed the offending party, dragged him through the apartment, then down three fights of stairs with him punching, kicking, and flailing the whole way.

“That’s the interplay.” I said. “We laid out Offerings of beer and food. Conjured people to attend the event through friendly invitation. Most times this goes perfectly well, but this one time it didn’t. so we had to Exorcize him from the premises. If all you know is how to jack someone up and force them to do what you want, you are severely limited in what you can accomplish. If however you have no ability to bounce someone from your space, or at least call for help, then it’s ill-advised to be conjuring in the first place.”

Does this mean you should always start with a friendly conjuration? No, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb. Some spirits cause problems off the bat, so if you are going to work with them at all it should be through forceful constraint. Some spirits treat the forceful constraint as a sort of test and won’t deal with anyone who doesn’t show strength. Sometimes the forceful constraining methods aren’t about the spirits nature so much as your ability to perceive them – a forceful constraint will often force the spirit to manifest closer to the physical than not.

If all this seems complicated, and that there are no hard and fast rules that you can apply accross the board, then good! Dealing with spirits, by definition subtle beings, is no less complex than dealing with people. Dealing with people is far from simple and straightforward. 

Check out my whole Witchlab interview, and stay tuned for more podcasts coming up.

Grab yourself a copy of Consorting With Spirits