Conjuring Spirits: A Manual of Goetic and Enochian Sorcery

by Michael Osiris Snuffin, Sam Webster (Illustrator)

Sorcery, defined here as the art of conjuring spirits, is one of the traditional, core disciplines of magickal practice. It is highly admired and its practitioners accorded great prestige. While many of the old grimoires have baroque and elaborate procedures for conjuring spirits, Frater Osiris cuts through the Gordian knot of complexity and obfuscation to present us with a much more direct approach to evoking Goetic and Enochian spirits. It is simple, clear, practical and without mystification. It is highly accessible and designed to enable practitioners to assemble the few tools required, prepare themselves, and begin work almost immediately reaping the practical and spiritual benefits of sorcerous practice. Naturally, it is an approach that some won't like, but many more will appropriate and tune to their own satisfaction. Anyone can get started here. Michael Osiris Snuffin has studied and practiced various forms of occultism for over fifteen years, with particular interest in the Golden Dawn, Thelema, Chaos Magick and the Left-Hand Path. He founded the Temple of Light and Darkness (www.templeoflightanddarkness.org) in 2003, and served as Chief Adept of the Temple until 2010. He is the author of The Thoth Companion (Llewellyn Publications, 2007), which describes and defines the symbolism of Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot. He has lectured on a number of occult subjects in the last decade and has also worked as a professional tarot reader. Michael Osiris Snuffin received a BA in Liberal Arts with an emphasis in Communications and Media from The Evergreen State College, and went on to earn an Editing Certificate from the University of Washington. He lives in Seattle, Washington, where he works as a freelance editor and writer.

Genres: Occult

160 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 2010

About the author

I have always had a passion for the written word, learning to read early and often. I got involved with my high school and college newspapers, writing opinion pieces and working on layout and design. I published my first magazine article at seventeen, and continued to write and publish articles through college. I graduated from The Evergreen State College in 1993, earning a BA in Liberal Arts with an emphasis in media and communications; there I studied media propaganda, literary journalism, and political science/economics.

In 1996 I started the research on tarot symbolism that eventually became my first book, The Thoth Companion. I also started giving public lectures and writing articles on the tarot and related subjects. When I began preparing my manuscript for submission, I discovered The Chicago Manual of Style, the bible of many book editors, and I developed an interest in editing. I realized I had a knack for editing work after helping Brandy Williams prepare her popular book, Practical Magic for Beginners, for submission to Llewellyn Publications in 2004.

While I had already taken a year of classes at North Seattle Community College to explore a possible career as a math teacher, my interest in numbers soon gave way to working with words. I eagerly enrolled in the Editing Certification Program at the University of Washington, which I completed in 2006. Unfortunately, after publishing and promoting The Thoth Companion in 2007-08, a medical accident left me with some serious health issues to deal with, delaying my debut as an professional editor for a couple of years.

I overcame those challenges and started preparing my second book, Conjuring Spirits: A Manual of Goetic and Enochian Sorcery, for release in 2010. During the publication process I also picked up a few clients, which led to more editing projects and opportunities. I truly enjoy editing work, and look forward to helping more authors and publishers make good books better.

In 2020, I published two more books: The Complete Conjuring Spirits, an expanded and revised edition of Conjuring Spirits; and Introduction to Romantic Satanism, An overview of the 19th century artistic and political movement that redefined Satan as a heroic rebel against tyranny, oppression, and injustice.

In my leisure time I enjoy reading books, researching, and writing. Particular topics of interest include cosmology, esotericism, Egyptology, symbolism, and linguistics. I have a large library, and I often browse used bookstores looking for new books of interest. I currently live in Tacoma, WA.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually try not to rate a book based on what I wish it were, rather than what it is, but in this case I can’t help feeling that the author has a much better conjuring book inside him, and I’d still like to see that book come to fruition one day. The author had, at the time of writing, many years of conjuring work behind him, and tried to create the “how-to” guide that he could have used when starting out, but, on the one hand, he left out a lot of the practical lessons he had learned along the way, and, on the other, he threw information at an untrained audience with insufficient context.

Let’s start with what is good in the book, however. In 2002, Michael Osiris Snuffin released a self-published pamphlet called “Practical Goetic Magick” which makes up the first 38 pages of this volume. I don’t have it to hand, but I suspect that this version was revised and updated for the book. It gives a beginning conjurer solid practical advice on how to perform an evocation and how to treat the spirits they call. Snuffin presents a reasonably agnostic take on the “objective” reality of the spirits he has worked with (maybe they are parts of the human psyche, akin to Jungian archetypes), but doesn't emphasize theory in this practical handbook: what is important isn’t whether they are “real” but whether they work for the individual magician. The structure is logical, and appendices include advice on which spirits to use for what, example ritual structure, and a transcript of a goetic working.

And then there’s the rest of the book. The second part of the book is “The Watchtower System,” which is far more esoteric conceptually, and seems to involve a lot of weird “correspondences” that require dozens of charts that look like crossword puzzles (or word-search puzzles with no actual words in them). All of the Enochian keys are reprinted here, and very little of the author’s voice is detectable in this section. Parts of it (like the Enochian, easily obtained elsewhere) seem like filler, intended to blow up the volume to the point where there are enough pages (barely) for a hardcover book. It’s unclear how you are supposed to use these crossword puzzles, and unclear why this is helpful in terms of evoking archetypes. Here, we needed more practical information and more beginner-level advice. Rather than giving all of these charts, it would have been better to delve into one in detail, and leave the student to discover the others as they advanced. Odd changes to the evocation procedure are suggested, such as, “Treat Watchtower entities in a friendly and respectful manner; they are not to be commanded or threatened like Goetic spirits” – if these are all just parts of my own mind, why treat some of them differently than others (until they earn that respect, at least)?

Overall, then, this is a 140-page book with just over forty pages of useful, interesting writing in it. Since you’re not likely to find the original “Practical Goetic Magick” text for sale at a reasonable price, this may be the best you can do, however. Snuffin does has an advantage in his approach in that he is not overly-wedded to any religious or ideological system, and thinks “outside of the boxes” that many magicians limit themselves to. I hope that one day he can write a book that expands on this one usefully.

[Michael Snuffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have published an updated and expanded version of this book: The Complete Conjuring Spirits