Magic and Sorcery: Summoned Out Of Thin Air

This refers as much to the fine art of conjuring up blog entries out of the flimsiest of inspirations, as it does refer to the art of conjuring up demons and incorporeal entities.

Fantasy stories, and some science fiction tales (e.g. Larry Niven's short story "Convergent Series"), have as their theme the summoning or conjuration of spirits, demons, djinn, ifrit, angels or whatever - whether they are benign or malign, creatures from some afterlife or astral plane, ethereal creatures tied to the land or shades and spectres summoned forth from beyond the veil of death.

Terminology

For the purpose of brevity, "daemon" will here refer to any kind of summoned entity, whatever its class or kind, and "home plane" will refer to the extraplanar, otherworldly plane of existence from whence such a shade comes.

If a description names a specific type of creature - spirit, demon, devil, angel, sprite, succubus - then the topic will be discussing that particular type of entity, and the peculiar nature of its summoning, binding, displacement or banishing.

The Purpose of Summoning

In every case, a summoner wishes to conjure up a daemon because the summoner needs something. Power, access to magic, immortality, the death of an enemy, sex - there is always something that the summoner needs, and which the summoner believes the entity is in a position to grant.

There is, usually, a price to pay: either something paid up front such as a human sacrifice, or something paid in arrears after the daemon has granted the summoner's wish: the summoner's firstborn child, for instance (Rumpelstiltskin), or the summoner's soul (Faustus).

It is only in rare cases that the summoner wants to conjure up a daemon out of sheer morbid curiosity - this drives the urban myth of Bloody Mary and is the plot of the Candyman movies and Beetlejuice. Invariably, the successful summoning of an entity just to satisfy curiosity would bring woe and misery to the incautious summoner.

Types of Entity

Demons - The archetype "fallen angel from Hell," always summoned by the antagonist in a story when he is up to no good. Larry Niven and Isaac Asimov both wrote science fiction stoies featuring such summonings. Asimov wrote a series of short stories about a tiny demon called Azazel, and the hapless human whom Azazel accompanies.

M R James' "The Casting Of The Runes" is based on a delayed summoning: the evil Carswell secretes a curse on the protagonist's body, intended to conjure up a demon to kill him at an appointed time.

Shakespeare's most infamous play, Macbeth, became a taboo play ("The Scottish Play") because of its inclusion of three witches and the entity they summon between them.

And of course, no discussion of summoned demons is complete without mentioning the story of Dr Johannes Faust, whose famous deal with the devilish entity Mephistopheles gave the term "Faustian deal" the name by which it has become associated ever since.

Succubi - A very specific kind of demon, both succubi and incubi are tied to myths about vampires - the succubus at first seduces, and then drains the life out of, the summoner or person she was summoned to seduce. Feature in stories by Richard Matheson "The Likeness of Julie," Stephen King (the Dark Tower series), the White Court of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series and TV series such as South Park and Being Human.

Ghosts - Shades of dead people visiting the earth for a time have been a staple of fiction since humans have told stories. M R James made the ghost story his stock in trade; but Dickens wrote a ghost story with a twist in the form of "The Signalman," where the Signalman was in fact a ghost from a future time, forewarning disaster; a theme used in the Space: 1999 episode "The Troubled Spirit," where the vengeful future ghost of the doomed Dan Mateo came back as a warning which, because it went unheeded, led to Mateo's untimely death at the ghost's own hands.

Ghosts are not restricted to humans alone: mythology is replete with stories of ghostly animals, ghost trains, ghost ships and ghost planes, among other spooky stories.

What characterises a ghost is the fact that it is an echo of a dead person or thing. Unlike demons, spirits or angels, a ghost is a shade of a formerly living person or thing that died or was destroyed. Ghosts, also, are marked by their being earthbound by some attachment - some sort of unfinished business which needs to be resolved before the ghost can move on, something that is an issue of existence in the series Being Human.

Some fictional series have the ability to summon ghosts to "cross the Great Divide" - the Halliwell witches of Charmed were particularly adept at such summonings.

Spirits - Not creatures from Hell, and not shades from the lands of the dead, this term here specifically refers to the animistic spirits which are tied to living features of the land; elemental creatures, such as undines, sylphs, nymphs, sirens, selkies, supernatural salamanders and other such creatures. The Prince of The Air in M  James' "Count Magnus" and the weird, indescribable familiar bestowed upon the titular Count by the Prince when summoned at that field in Chorazin near Palestine are example spirits; also Ariel, the entity controlled and bound by Prospero in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," was such a spirit, ultimately sent back from whence she came when Prospero abjured his rough books and renounced sorcery.

Genies and Ifrit - The "genie in the bottle," the Genie of the Lamp, the Genie of the Ring, all feature in the Thousand Nights And One Night, and underpin a thousand Arabian Nights stories. Ifrit ae creatures of smokeless flame from a great and terrible City of Brass, and the djinn are creatures of the air and the sky; neither entity is entirely to be trusted. Like demons, they can grant the most vulgar of desires. And like demons, the price they pay is ultimately disproportionate to the gifts granted ...

Other Entities -  Other creatures have appeared in fiction, appearing spontaneously such as stories of the "Angel of Mons" or Valkyrie of Norse legend, turning up at a battle to haul the souls of the honoured fallen to Valhalla; the Furies of Geek mythology, turning up to avenge a great wrong; the eagle sent to punish Prometheus each day by ripping out his liver, for his crime of stealing fire; and the various spirits of Aboriginal, Native American, Chinese, Japanese, Welsh, Russian and other nations' lore. Episodes of The X-Files sometimes dealt with summoned entities wreaking havoc, such as Tibetan tulpas or "thought forms," or internal invocations of entities such as the transformative summoning of the inner wolf form of lycanthropy (shapeshifting, however, is a topic for another time).

Tabletop roleplaying games, also, are replete with such entities - they form the focus of a number of supplements of the Legend roleplaying game, not to mention the sourcebooks "Inferno," "The Book of The Dead," "Summoners," "Pandora's Book" and "The Book of Spirits" of White Wolf's World of Darkness and other games.

Magic is replete with stories of summonings. Entities, guardian angels, demons, daemons, succubi, thought forms, tulpas; they would not exist without humans. Human need conjures up these entities as much as any spells; so the whole topic is as much about the people who make such deals with the non-human entities as it is about the summoned entities themselves.