San Jose, California
San Jose the City of San José, is an economic and political center of Silicon Valley, the largest city in Northern California. With an estimated 2017 population of 1,035,317, it is the third-most populous city in California and the tenth-most populous in United States. Located in the center of the Santa Clara Valley, on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay, San Jose covers an area of 179.97 square miles. San Jose is the county seat of Santa Clara County, the most affluent county in California and one of the most affluent counties in the United States. San Jose is the most populous city in both the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area, which contain 7.7 million and 8.7 million people respectively. San Jose is a global city, notable as a center of innovation, for its affluence, Mediterranean climate, high cost of living. San Jose's location within the booming high tech industry, as a cultural and economic center has earned the city the nickname "Capital of Silicon Valley".
San Jose is one of the wealthiest major cities in the United States and the world, has the third highest GDP per capita in the world, according to the Brookings Institution. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the most millionaires and the most billionaires in the United States per capita. With a median home price of $1,085,000, San Jose has the most expensive housing market in the country and the fifth most expensive housing market in the world, according to the 2017 Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. Major global tech companies including Cisco Systems, eBay, Adobe Systems, PayPal, Samsung, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Western Digital maintain their headquarters in San Jose, in the center of Silicon Valley. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the area around San Jose was inhabited by the Tamien nation of the Ohlone peoples of California. San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777, as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first city founded in the Californias, it became a part of Mexico in 1821 after the Mexican War of Independence.
Following the American Conquest of California during the Mexican–American War, the territory was ceded to the United States in 1848. After California achieved statehood two years San Jose became the state's first capital. Following World War II, San Jose experienced an economic boom, with a rapid population growth and aggressive annexation of nearby cities and communities carried out in the 1950s and 1960s; the rapid growth of the high-technology and electronics industries further accelerated the transition from an agricultural center to an urbanized metropolitan area. Results of the 1990 U. S. Census indicated that San Jose had surpassed San Francisco as the most populous city in Northern California. By the 1990s, San Jose and the rest of Silicon Valley had become the global center for the high tech and internet industries, making it California's fastest-growing economy; the Santa Clara Valley has been home to the Tamyen group of the Ohlone people since around 4,000 BCE. The Tamyen spoke Tamyen language of the Ohlone language family.
With the Spanish colonization of California, the majority of the Tamyen came to inhabit Mission Santa Clara de Asís and Mission San José. California was claimed as part of the Spanish Empire in 1542, when explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo charted the Californian coast. During this time and Baja California were administered together as Province of the California. For nearly 200 years, the Californias were sparsely populated and ignored by the government of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in Mexico City. Only in 1769 was Northern California surveyed by Spanish authorities, with the Portolá Expedition. In 1776, the Californias were included as part of the Captaincy General of the Provincias Internas, a large administrative division created by José de Gálvez, Spanish Minister of the Indies, in order to provide greater autonomy for the Spanish Empire's populated and ungoverned borderlands; that year, King Carlos III of Spain approved an expedition by Juan Bautista de Anza to survey the San Francisco Bay Area, in order to choose the sites for two future settlements and their accompanying mission.
First he chose the site for a military settlement in San Francisco, for the Royal Presidio of San Francisco, Mission San Francisco de Asís. On his way back to Mexico from San Francisco, de Anza chose the sites in Santa Clara Valley for a civilian settlement, San Jose, on the eastern bank of the Guadalupe River, a mission on its western bank, Mission Santa Clara de Asís. San Jose was founded as California's first civilian settlement on November 29, 1777, as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe by José Joaquín Moraga, under orders of Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa, Viceroy of New Spain. San Jose served as a strategic settlement along El Camino Real, connecting the military fortifications at the Monterey Presidio and the San Francisco Presidio, as well as the California mission network. In 1791, due to the severe flooding which characterized the pueblo, San Jose's settlement was moved a mile south, centered on the Pueblo Plaza. In 1800, due to the growing population in the northern part of the Californias, Diego de Borica, Governor of the Californias split the province into two parts: Alta California, which would become a U.
S. state, Baja California, which would become two Mexican states. San Jose became part of the First M
Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance is the alleged ability to gain information about an object, location, or physical event through extrasensory perception. Any person, claimed to have such ability is said accordingly to be a clairvoyant. Claims for the existence of paranormal and psychic abilities such as clairvoyance have not been supported by scientific evidence published in high impact factor peer reviewed journals. Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of the paranormal is not accepted by the scientific community. Parapsychology, including the study of clairvoyance, is an example of pseudoscience. Pertaining to the ability of clear-sightedness, clairvoyance refers to the paranormal ability to see persons and events that are distant in time or space, it can be divided into three classes: precognition, the ability to perceive or predict future events, the ability to see past events, remote viewing, the perception of contemporary events happening outside of the range of normal perception. Throughout history, there have been numerous places and times in which people have claimed themselves or others to be clairvoyant.
A number of Christian saints were said to be able to see or know things that were far removed from their immediate sensory perception as a kind of gift from God, including Columba of Iona, Padre Pio and Anne Catherine Emmerich. Jesus Christ in the Gospels is recorded as being able to know things that were far removed from his immediate human perception. In other religions, similar stories of certain individuals being able to see things far removed from their immediate sensory perception are commonplace within pagan religions where oracles were used. Prophecy involved some degree of clairvoyance when future events were predicted. In most of these cases, the ability to see things was attributed to a higher power and not thought of as an ability that lay within the person himself. In Jainism, clairvoyance is regarded as one of the five kinds of knowledge; the beings of hell and heaven are said to possess clairvoyance by birth. According to Jain text Sarvārthasiddhi, "this kind of knowledge has been called avadhi as it ascertains matter in downward range or knows objects within limits".
The earliest record of somnambulistic clairvoyance is credited to the Marquis de Puységur, a follower of Franz Mesmer, who in 1784 was treating a local dull-witted peasant named Victor Race. During treatment, Race would go into trance and undergo a personality change, becoming fluent and articulate, giving diagnosis and prescription for his own disease as well as those of others. Clairvoyance was a reported ability of some mediums during the spiritualist period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, psychics of many descriptions have claimed clairvoyant ability up to the present day. Early researchers of clairvoyance included William Gregory, Gustav Pagenstecher, Rudolf Tischner. Clairvoyance experiments were reported in 1884 by Charles Richet. Playing cards were enclosed in envelopes and a subject put under hypnosis attempted to identify them; the subject was reported to have been successful in a series of 133 trials but the results dropped to chance level when performed before a group of scientists in Cambridge.
J. M. Peirce and E. C. Pickering reported a similar experiment in which they tested 36 subjects over 23,384 trials which did not obtain above chance scores. Ivor Lloyd Tuckett and Joseph McCabe analyzed early cases of clairvoyance and came to the conclusion they were best explained by coincidence or fraud. In 1919, the magician P. T. Selbit staged a séance at his own flat in Bloomsbury; the spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle attended the séance and declared the clairvoyance manifestations to be genuine. A significant development in clairvoyance research came when J. B. Rhine, a parapsychologist at Duke University, introduced a standard methodology, with a standard statistical approach to analyzing data, as part of his research into extrasensory perception. A number of psychological departments attempted to repeat Rhine's experiments with failure. W. S. Cox from Princeton University with 132 subjects produced 25,064 trials in a playing card ESP experiment. Cox concluded "There is no evidence of extrasensory perception either in the'average man' or of the group investigated or in any particular individual of that group.
The discrepancy between these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in the subjects." Four other psychological departments failed to replicate Rhine's results. It was revealed that Rhine's experiments contained procedural errors. Eileen Garrett was tested by Rhine at Duke University in 1933 with Zener cards. Certain symbols that were placed on the cards and sealed in an envelope, she was asked to guess their contents, she performed poorly and criticized the tests by claiming the cards lacked a psychic energy called "energy stimulus" and that she could not perform clairvoyance to order. The parapsychologist Samuel Soal and his colleagues tested Garrett in May, 1937. Most of the experiments were carried out in the Psychological Laboratory at the University College London. A total of over 12,000 guesses were recorded but Garrett failed to produce above chance level. In his report Soal wrote "In the case of Mrs. Eileen Garrett we fail to find the slightest confirmation of Dr. J. B.
Rhine's remarkable claims relating to her alleged powers of extra-sensory perception. Not only did she fail when I took charge of the experiments, but she failed when four other trained experimenters took my place." Remote viewing, al
Preternatural
The preternatural or praeternatural is that which appears outside or beside the natural. It is "suspended between the mundane and the miraculous". In theology, the term is used to distinguish marvels or deceptive trickery attributed to witchcraft or demons, from the purely divine power of the genuinely supernatural to violate the laws of nature. In the early modern period, the term was used by scientists to refer to abnormalities and strange phenomena of various kinds that seemed to depart from the norms of nature. Medieval theologians made a clear distinction between the natural, the preternatural and the supernatural. Thomas Aquinas argued that the supernatural consists in "God’s unmediated actions". Marvels belong, properly speaking, to the realm of the preternatural." Theologians, following Aquinas, argued that only God had the power to disregard the laws of nature that he has created, but that demons could manipulate the laws of nature by a form of trickery, to deceive the unwary into believing they had experienced real miracles.
According to historian Lorraine Daston, Although demons, astral intelligences, other spirits might manipulate natural causes with superhuman dexterity and thereby work marvels, as mere creatures they could never transcend from the preternatural to the supernatural and work genuine miracles. By the 16th century, the term "preternatural" was used to refer to demonic activity comparable to the use of magic by human adepts: The Devil, "being a natural Magician... may perform many acts in ways above our knowledge, though not transcending our natural power." According to the philosophy of the time, preternatural phenomena were not contrary to divine law, but used hidden, or occult powers that violated the normal pattern of natural phenomena. With the emergence of early modern science, the concept of the preternatural came to be used to refer to strange or abnormal phenomena that seemed to violate the normal working of nature, but which were not associated with magic and witchcraft; this was a development of the idea.
As Daston puts it, "To simplify the historical sequence somewhat: first, preternatural phenomena were demonized and thereby incidentally naturalized. The use of the term was common in medicine, for example in John Brown's A Compleat Treatise of Preternatural Tumours, or William Smellie's A Collection of Preternatural Cases and Observations in Midwifery. In the 19th century the term was appropriated in anthropology to refer to folk beliefs about fairies and other such creatures which were not thought of as demonic, but which were perceived to affect the natural world in unpredictable ways. According to Thorstein Veblen, such preternatural agents were thought of as forces somewhere between supernatural beings and material processes. "The preternatural agency is not conceived to be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of somewhat arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise, of any contest."The linguistic association between individual agents and unexplained or unfortunate circumstances remains.
Many people attribute occurrences that are known to be material processes, such as "gremlins in the engine", a "ghost in the machine", or attributing motives to objects: "the clouds are threatening". The anthropomorphism in our daily life is a combination of the above cultural stems, as well as the manifestation of our pattern-projecting minds. In 2011, Penn State Press began publishing a learned journal titled Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural. Edited by Kirsten Uszkalo and Richard Raiswell, the journal is dedicated to publishing articles and short editions of original texts that deal with conceptions and perceptions of the preternatural in any culture and in any historical period; the journal covers "magics, spiritualism, prophecy, monstrophy and folklore." Paranormal Supernatural "What is the difference between natural and supernatural?" Possession and Exorcism, J. A. Fortea
Supernatural
The concept of the supernatural encompasses anything, inexplicable by scientific understanding of the laws of nature but argued by believers to exist. Examples include immaterial beings such as angels and spirits, claimed human abilities like magic and extrasensory perception. Supernatural entities have been invoked to explain phenomena as diverse as lightning and the human senses. Naturalists maintain that nothing beyond the physical world exists and hence maintain skeptical attitudes towards supernatural concepts; the supernatural is featured in paranormal and religious contexts, but can feature as an explanation in more secular contexts. Occurring as both an adjective and a noun, descendants of the modern English compound supernatural enters the language from two sources: via Middle French and directly from the Middle French's term's ancestor, post-Classical Latin. Post-classical Latin supernaturalis first occurs in the 6th century, composed of the Latin prefix super- and nātūrālis; the earliest known appearance of the word in the English language occurs in a Middle English translation of Catherine of Siena's Dialogue.
The semantic value of the term has shifted over the history of its use. The term referred to Christian understandings of the world. For example, as an adjective, the term can mean'belonging to a realm or system that transcends nature, as that of divine, magical, or ghostly beings. Obsolete uses include'of, relating to, or dealing with metaphysics'; as a noun, the term can mean'a supernatural being', with a strong history of employment in relation to entities from the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The metaphysical considerations of the existence of the supernatural can be difficult to approach as an exercise in philosophy or theology because any dependencies on its antithesis, the natural, will have to be inverted or rejected. One complicating factor is that there is disagreement about the definition of "natural" and the limits of naturalism. Concepts in the supernatural domain are related to concepts in religious spirituality and occultism or spiritualism. For sometimes we use the word nature for that Author of nature whom the schoolmen, harshly enough, call natura naturans, as when it is said that nature hath made man corporeal and immaterial.
Sometimes we mean by the nature of a thing the essence, or that which the schoolmen scruple not to call the quiddity of a thing, the attribute or attributes on whose score it is what it is, whether the thing be corporeal or not, as when we attempt to define the nature of an angle, or of a triangle, or of a fluid body, as such. Sometimes we take nature for an internal principle of motion, as when we say that a stone let fall in the air is by nature carried towards the centre of the earth, and, on the contrary, that fire or flame does move upwards toward firmament. Sometimes we understand by nature the established course of things, as when we say that nature makes the night succeed the day, nature hath made respiration necessary to the life of men. Sometimes we take nature for an aggregate of powers belonging to a body a living one, as when physicians say that nature is strong or weak or spent, or that in such or such diseases nature left to herself will do the cure. Sometimes we take nature for the universe, or system of the corporeal works of God, as when it is said of a phoenix, or a chimera, that there is no such thing in nature, i.e. in the world.
And sometimes too, that most we would express by nature a semi-deity or other strange kind of being, such as this discourse examines the notion of. And besides these more absolute acceptions, if I may so call them, of the word nature, it has divers others, as nature is wont to be set or in opposition or contradistinction to other things, as when we say of a stone when it falls downwards that it does it by a natural motion, but that if it be thrown upwards its motion that way is violent. So chemists distinguish vitriol into natural and fictitious, or made by art, i.e. by the intervention of human power or skill. We say that wicked men are still in the state of nature, but the regenerate in a state of grace; the term "supernatural" is used interchangeably with paranormal or preternatural — the latter limited to an adjective for describing abilities which appear to exceed what is possible within the boundaries of the laws of physics. Epistemologically, the relationship between the supernatural and the natural is indistinct in terms of natural phenomena that, ex hypothesi, violate the laws of nature, in so far as such laws are realistically accountable.
Parapsychologists use the term psi to refer to an assumed unitary force underlying the phenomena they study. Psi is defined in the Journal of Parapsychology as "personal factors or processes in nature which transcend accepted laws" and "which are non-physical in nature", it is used to cover both extrasensory perception, an "awareness of or response to an external event or influence not apprehended by sens
Paranormal
Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as beyond normal experience or scientific explanation. Proposals regarding the paranormal are different from scientific hypotheses or speculations extrapolated from scientific evidence because scientific ideas are grounded in empirical observations and experimental data gained through the scientific method. In contrast, those who argue for the existence of the paranormal explicitly do not base their arguments on empirical evidence but rather on anecdote and suspicion. Notable paranormal beliefs include those that pertain to telepathy, extrasensory perception and the pseudosciences of ghost hunting and ufology; the term "paranormal" has existed in the English language since at least 1920. The word consists of two parts: normal; the definition implies that the scientific explanation of the world around us is'normal' and anything, above, beyond, or contrary to that is'para'.
On the classification of paranormal subjects, Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal wrote: The paranormal can best be thought of as a subset of pseudoscience. What sets the paranormal apart from other pseudosciences is a reliance on explanations for alleged phenomena that are well outside the bounds of established science. Thus, paranormal phenomena include extrasensory perception, ghosts, life after death, faith healing, human auras, so forth; the explanations for these allied phenomena are phrased in vague terms of "psychic forces", "human energy fields", so on. This is in contrast to many pseudoscientific explanations for other nonparanormal phenomena, although bad science, are still couched in acceptable scientific terms. In traditional ghostlore and fiction featuring ghosts, a ghost is a manifestation of the spirit or soul of a person. Alternative theories include belief in the ghosts of deceased animals. Sometimes the term "ghost" is used synonymously with any spirit or demon, however in popular usage the term refers to a deceased person's spirit.
The belief in ghosts as souls of the departed is tied to the concept of animism, an ancient belief which attributed souls to everything in nature. As the 19th-century anthropologist George Frazer explained in his classic work, The Golden Bough, souls were seen as the creature within that animated the body. Although the human soul was sometimes symbolically or depicted in ancient cultures as a bird or other animal, it was held that the soul was an exact reproduction of the body in every feature down to clothing the person wore; this is depicted in artwork from various ancient cultures, including such works as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (ca. which shows deceased people in the afterlife appearing much as they did before death, including the style of dress. Although the evidence for ghosts is anecdotal, the belief in ghosts throughout history has remained widespread and persistent; the possibility of extraterrestrial life is not, by itself, a paranormal subject. Many scientists are engaged in the search for unicellular life within the solar system, carrying out studies on the surface of Mars and examining meteors that have fallen to Earth.
Projects such as SETI are conducting an astronomical search for radio activity that would show evidence of intelligent life outside the solar system. Scientific theories of how life developed on Earth allow for the possibility that life developed on other planets as well; the paranormal aspect of extraterrestrial life centers around the belief in unidentified flying objects and the phenomena said to be associated with them. Early in the history of UFO culture, believers divided themselves into two camps; the first held a rather conservative view of the phenomena, interpreting them as unexplained occurrences that merited serious study. They began calling themselves "ufologists" in the 1950s and felt that logical analysis of sighting reports would validate the notion of extraterrestrial visitation; the second camp consisted of individuals who coupled ideas of extraterrestrial visitation with beliefs from existing quasi-religious movements. These individuals were enthusiasts of occultism and the paranormal.
Many had backgrounds as active Theosophists, Spiritualists, or were followers of other esoteric doctrines. In contemporary times, many of these beliefs have coalesced into New Age spiritual movements. Both secular and spiritual believers describe UFOs as having abilities beyond what are considered possible according to known aerodynamic constraints and physical laws; the transitory events surrounding many UFO sightings limits the opportunity for repeat testing required by the scientific method. Acceptance of UFO theories by the larger scientific community is further hindered by the many possible hoaxes associated with UFO culture. Cryptozoology is a pseudoscience and subculture that aims to prove the existence of entities from the folklore record, such as Bigfoot, chupacabras, or Mokele-mbembe. Cryptozoologists refer to these entities as a term coined by the subculture. Approaching the paranormal from a research perspective is difficult because of the lack of acceptable physical evidence from most of the purported phenomena.
By definition, the paranormal does not conform to conventional expectations of nature. Therefore, a phenomenon cannot be confirmed as paranormal using the scientific method because, if it could be, it would no longer fit the definition. Despite this problem
Magic (supernatural)
Magic is a category in Western culture into which have been placed various beliefs and practices considered separate from both religion and science. The term had pejorative connotations, with things labelled magical perceived as being primitive and Other; the concept has been adopted by scholars in the study of religion and the social sciences, who have proposed various different—and mutually exclusive—definitions of the term. The term magic derives from the Old Persian magu, a word that applied to a form of religious functionary about which little is known. During the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, this term was adopted into Ancient Greek, where it was used with negative connotations, to apply to religious rites that were regarded as fraudulent and dangerous; this meaning of the term was adopted by Latin in the first century BCE. Via Latin, the concept was incorporated into Christian theology during the first century CE, where magic was associated with demons and thus defined against religion.
This concept was pervasive throughout the Middle Ages, when Christian authors categorised a diverse range of practices—such as enchantment, incantations, divination and astrology—under the label magic. In early modern Europe, Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to create the idea of natural magic. Both negative and positive understandings of the term were retained in Western culture over the following centuries, with the former influencing early academic usages of the word. Since the nineteenth century, academics in various disciplines have employed the term magic but have defined it in different ways and used it in reference to different things. One approach, associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, uses the term to describe beliefs in hidden sympathies between objects that allow one to influence the other. Defined in this way, magic is portrayed as the opposite to science. An alternative approach, associated with the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Émile Durkheim, employs the term to describe private rites and ceremonies and contrasts it with religion, which it defines as a communal and organised activity.
Many scholars of religion have rejected the utility of the term magic, arguing that it is arbitrary and ethnocentric. Throughout Western history, there have been examples of individuals who engaged in practices that their societies called magic and who sometimes referred to themselves as magicians. Within modern occultism, there are many self-described magicians and people who practice ritual activities that they term magic. In this environment, the concept of magic has again changed being defined as a technique for bringing about changes in the physical world through the force of one's will; this definition was pioneered by the influential British occultist Aleister Crowley. The historian Owen Davies stated that the word magic was "beyond simple definition"; the historian Michael D. Bailey characterised magic as "a contested category and a fraught label". Scholars have engaged in extensive debates as to how to define magic, with such debates resulting in intense dispute. Throughout such debates, the scholarly community has failed to agree on a definition of magic, in a similar manner to how they have failed to agree on a definition of religion.
Among those throughout history who have described themselves as magicians, there has been no common understanding of what magic is. Concepts of magic serve to demarcate certain practices from other, otherwise similar practices in a given society. According to Bailey: "In many cultures and across various historical periods, categories of magic define and maintain the limits of and culturally acceptable actions in respect to numinous or occult entities or forces. More they serve to delineate arenas of appropriate belief." In this, he noted that "drawing these distinctions is an exercise in power". The scholar of religion Randall Styers noted that attempting to define magic represents "an act of demarcation" by which it is juxtaposed against "other social practices and modes of knowledge" such as "religion" and "science"; the historian Karen Louise Jolly described magic as "a category of exclusion, used to define an unacceptable way of thinking as either the opposite of religion or of science".
Within Western culture, the term "magic" has been linked to ideas of the Other and primitivism. In Styers' words, it has become "a powerful marker of cultural difference", it has been presented as the archetypally non-modern phenomenon. Among Western intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, magic was seen as a defining feature of "primitive" mentalities and was attributed to marginal groups and periods; the concept and term "magic" developed in European society and thus using it when discussing non-Western cultures or pre-modern forms of Western society raises problems, as it may impose Western categories that are alien to them. While "magic" remains an emic term in the history of Western societies, it remains an etic term when applied to non-Western societies. During the twentieth century, many scholars focusing on Asian and African societies rejected the term "magic", as well as related concepts like "witchcraft", in favour of the more precise terms and concepts that existed within these specific societie
Evocation
Evocation is the act of calling upon or summoning a spirit, god or other supernatural agent, in the Western mystery tradition. Comparable practices exist in many religions and magical traditions and may employ the use of mind-altering substances with and without uttered word formulas; the Latin word evocatio was "summoning away" of a city's tutelary deity. The ritual was conducted in a military setting either as a threat during a siege or as a result of surrender, aimed at diverting the god's favor from the opposing city to the Roman side, customarily with a promise of a better-endowed cult or a more lavish temple. Evocatio was thus a kind of ritual dodge to mitigate looting of sacred objects or images from shrines that would otherwise be sacrilegious or impious; the calling forth of spirits was a common practice in Neoplatonism and other esoteric systems of antiquity. In contemporary western esotericism, the magic of the grimoires is seen as the classical example of this idea. Manuals such as the Greater Key of Solomon the King, The Lesser Key of Solomon, the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and many others provided instructions that combined intense devotion to the divine with the summoning of a personal cadre of spiritual advisers and familiars.
The grimoires provided a variety of methods of evocation. The spirits are, in many cases, commanded in the name of God - most using cabalistic and Hellenic'barbarous names' added together to form long litanies; the magician used wands, staves and fire, daggers and complex diagrams drawn on parchment or upon the ground. In Enochian magic, spirits are evoked into a crystal ball or mirror, in which a human volunteer is expected to be able to see the spirit and hear its voice, passing the words on to the evoker. Sometimes such a seer might be an actual medium. In other cases the spirit might be'housed' in a symbolic image, or conjured into a diagram from which it cannot escape without the magician's permission. While many corrupt and commercialized grimoires include elements of'diabolism' and one offers a method for making a pact with the devil, in general the art of evocation of spirits is said to be done under the power of the divine; the magician is thought to gain authority among the spirits only by purity and personal devotion and study.
In more recent usage, evocation refers to the calling out of lesser spirits, sometimes conceived of as arising from the self. This sort of evocation is contrasted with invocation, in which spiritual powers are called into the self from a divine source. Important contributors to the concept of evocation include Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Francis Barrett, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, Franz Bardon and Kenneth Grant; the work of all of these authors can be seen as attempts to systematize and modernize the grimoiric procedure of evocation. Many modern authors, such as Peter Carroll and Konstantinos, have attempted to describe evocation in a way independent enough from the grimoiric tradition to fit similar methods of interaction with alleged supernatural agents in other traditions. Conjuration in traditional and most contemporary usage refers to a magical act of invoking spirits or using incantations or charms to cast magical spells. In the context of legerdemain, it may refer to the performance of illusion or magic tricks for show.
This article discusses the original and primary usage, describing acts of a supernatural or paranormal nature. The word conjuration can be interpreted in several different ways: as an evocation; the word is used synonymously with terms such as "invocation" or "evocation" or "summoning", although many authors find it useful to maintain some distinction between these terms. The term "conjuring" is used as a general term for casting spells in some magical traditions, such as Hoodoo. In that context and talismans are kept in a "conjure bag" and "conjuring oils" may be used to anoint candles and other magical supplies and thus imbue them with specific magical powers. Alternatively, the term "conjuration" may be used refer to an act of illusionism or legerdemain, as in the performance of magic tricks for entertainment. One who performs conjurations is called a conjuror; the word was used in its Latin meaning of "conspiracy". The text of the charms to be recited to conjure the spirit varies from simple sentences to complex paragraphs with plenty of magic words.
The language is that of the conjurer's, but since the Middle Ages in Western tradition, Latin was the most common. The conjuration of the ghosts or souls of the dead for the purpose of divination is called necromancy; when it is said that a person is calling upon or conjuring misfortune or disease, it is due to the ancient belief that personified diseases and misfortune as evil deities, spirits or demons that could enter a human or bestial body. A conjuration is traditionally linked to repelling negative spirits away, protecting an individual, space or collective. However, it is believed by some in Christianity and Islam, that magic and conjuration is an inherently evil practice. Conjurers summon demons or other evil spirits to cause harm to people or things, to obtain favors from them, or to enter their servitude; the belief in similarly-minded conjurers exists in be
