The Story Within a Story - Evocation

 Hello. C J here. My vacation’s been great. I cooked food and ate it for a week straight instead of typing. I’m most of the way through my book I’m reading and I’ve played double video games. I’ve done everything on the game designer vacation to do list twice. In other words I’m bored. I’m back up to full stamina for typing and I’ll resume art next week at the latest. It’s just those darn fantasy genre backgrounds that burnt me out. They take so much work to make them look like the fantasy genre but as a wall.

Now I’m back to work or at least back to typing. I’ll figure out when I want to return to art later. My next set of real life magic systems I want to discuss is evocation and traditional ceremonial magic. Now these are technically two interrelated but different things. Both of them are planned to be in the card game heavily. When people think of high fantasy magic with incantations, props, tools, special robes and hand motions they are thinking of this tradition and only it.

Ceremonial magic hails from the British Empire and the work of a number of mystic and occult organizations. In particular the British Empire organization The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was responsible for the creation of this style of occult practice. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn sought to transcribe the works of ancient mystics into their language, to contact angels of the heavens and to perfect the usage of tarot cards as a form of divination. At least that’s what my records of the organization all say.

I’ve read most of their spells and rituals in books before. There are not many of them but there is a lot of lore about how they used tarot cards. They relied on expensive and hard to manufacture tools and props to do every piece of a ritual or spell. Things like wooden triangles to stand on inscribed with words in ancient Hebrew, wands with metallic magnetized cores and expensive coloured robes that were used only for one type of spell on one day of the week were common in their system.

I’m trying to take all of this and break it down into smaller pieces I can put on cards. The coloured robes in particular were my inspiration for making the Essence cards colour themed. The Essence cards  feature black as well as the seven chakra colours and I’m working on what the other twelve symbols or tools on them will be. These have to equal twenty in total so I can print them and I might end up putting everything left over on these cards.

The original spells this organization used were mostly meant to summon angels and other heavenly beings. Their spells are complex, expensive and quite frankly do absolutely nothing. There are spells to raise spiritual power and call the angels but none of them actually produce a measurable result. I mean they have no goals that can be proven or acted upon. Call the angels. Just that. That’s not really a goal as you can’t really tell if it happened.

My point is the tools and ideas they had were worth recording but their methods were incomplete. This is why I’m including every tool and idea I can find on cards all together in one game. The hope is that what one discipline is missing another discipline will have. Science is like this. So is magic. If the goal is to meet an angel then there had better be an angel having a really useful conversation with you in your living room over a cup of hot tea by the end of the spell or it didn’t work. I don’t know if angels drink tea. I guess they don’t really know that either.

C J Mcpherson