"A Fragment of Underdone Potato..."- Physical contact with conjured spirits, or not?

In the last blog post, I described my first experience where there seemed to be a physical contact with a spirit, the spirit of Mercury, Taphthartharath.  I was slightly surprised by the intensity of the experience, and reported to be glad to be a little more protected during this conjuration than in some others.  After I published this description, there was a comment made to RO on Facebook indicating the authoress thought I might have been in some danger during the rite.  While that is not impossible, I would say that it wasn’t likely.  Recall that the spirit was summoned into a crystal situated on a table of practice, which is to say inside a circle of angels and inside the traditional triangle.

I appreciated the comment very much, though, because it shows that the person who wrote the remark actually experienced something of the surprising intensity of the event.  It was indeed a disturbing sort of episode.  However, I may actually not have described well that while I experienced the spirit physically with my skin and eyes, that I did not believe that he was in actual physical contact with my body.  And, intense though it was, I don’t believe it was dangerous, or even odd.  For me, spirit conjuration always has at least some degree of body-sensory inclusion to it, and I don’t believe those experiences to have been damaging.   The experiences described in this blog notwithstanding, I have a normal existence that includes healthy human relationships, adequate self-care and a paycheck.

Besides the larger question of whether spirits have reality external to us or not (i.e. is he “a plot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato” or not, with apologies to Charles Dickens), it’s not necessary for any person or being to touch me for me to have an experience of them.  In some ways, the simple version of this statement is “my eye doesn’t need to touch the crystal to see what’s inside the crystal.”  Just as when one is focused, one can sense heat from another person’s body, I don’t see any reason why this can’t be a sort of amplified version of the sensation you get when someone is watching you. I say amplified because it occurred in a ritual scenario when all of my senses had been turned up to 11.

Another source of the “feelings” could also be that during ritual data initially received as visual gets funneled through the imagination and can emerge as other sensory  information.  This leads to such observations as “T. is slimy, dark and metallic,” which I wrote in my magickal diary after the event was over.  This sort of data handling synesthesia could be used to explain much of spirit manifestation, including the descriptions of the Aethyrs and the catalog of spirits in Lemegeton’s Goetia, I believe.

Blessed Be Thou

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