Spirit Lover Information Hub

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a couple of lectures by the author Christopher Penczak, who was in town doing a couple of in person classes + exercise sets. I attended his Kabbalah lectures last year and found them to be a good refresher, and felt that I got a lot out of his classes this year as well.

This year we talked about dealing with curses (and other malevolent magical situations), as well as invocation + evocation. While I’d love to cover a lot of the material we talked about during those classes, the material was his and the invocation + evocation class in particular was pulling from his higher level witchcraft classes, so if you find any of that stuff interesting, I’d recommend checking out his books and classes and seeing if you resonate with the things he teaches.

There was one subject that we did talk about briefly during these classes, mostly through asking questions, and that was oath making and oath breaking, which he had most commonly seen happen with newer practitioners that very flippantly made oaths to serve specific deities. These aren’t oaths in the legal sense so much as what may more colloquially be thought of as a dedication.

These oaths would inevitably get the practitioners into some sort of trouble, often either eventually subsuming their will to the will of that deity (or deific force, depending on how you view things) if they stuck with it, or leading inevitably to a grimy cutoff which carried its own problems. There were also those that would make oaths to specific groups, like covens, and then would run into issues if they tried to renege on that if the group was more strict.

Oath-making is also something that I brought up as being common with spirit lovers, particularly in the marriage sense. We discussed some of the dangers in that dynamic as well. I’ve already discussed what breaking things off with a spirit lover can look like, though these breakups are often outside of a formalized oath. I think it’s worth examining what a formalized oath may look like and how that differs from summoning and a normal relationship. I won’t be providing a specific ritual for oath-making here (besides being dangerous if you decide to renege later, I think coming up with your own ritual collaboratively with the spirit is useful for the intimacy involved in this case), but I will be talking about what constitutes making an ‘oath’ in our contexts, and whether that kind of oath is something you might be ready for.

What Qualifies as an Oath?

To start, we should differentiate an oath from a promise and from an exchange or payment. An oath in our context is a dedication that you make to an entity, group, deity, etc. for what is usually a very long time or forever. In our context this would be something we might think of as ‘marriage’, which could be thought of as simply as ‘I will be with you forever’ (until death doesn’t really work with spirits). Making a formal declaration like that to a spirit and then trying to break it is asking to end up in deep shit with that entity and sometimes spiritually in general. Emphasis on the formality of it; I don’t want you to think something cutesy or flirty that you communicated to a spirit will couple you to them for life. Making an oath should generally be very formal and complex for your own safety. Making what are intended to be real oaths flippantly is a shortcut to suffering.

A promise is usually something more short term and can be about nearly anything. You can promise you’ll do a specific ritual with or for your spirit lover later that week, or offer to take them on a ‘date’. If you break these promises there will be some level of disappointment, but unless you make a habit of it that disappointment is likely going to fade like it would if your friend cancelled on you last minute or something similar.

A ‘payment’ or ‘exchange’ is more tit-for-tat. For example: ‘If you do this invocation exercise with me (in this example, if she lets me invoke her), I’ll get us pancakes for lunch when we’re done’. Since a service is involved, if you don’t follow through you’re more likely to get into some sort of trouble, but it’s likely to be short term or contingent on some payment being made later. Skip the pancakes and you may be able to make it up to them a few days later with some other unhealthy lunch.

Summoning a spirit lover is NOT an oath unless you add a part into the ritual that makes it one (and the rituals shared on this blog thus far do not create oaths). Here’s what adding an oath portion to a summoning method would look like versus a payment:

Payment: When doing the letter method you decide to make out your letter to Lilith and to ask her for one of her daughters. As payment you intentionally add a part to the letter that includes a promise to conduct a formal ritual of thanks to Lilith on a specific date. The ritual succeeds and you begin a relationship with a spirit lover. You carry out the ritual as planned, and things continue as expected.

In such a case, you could end up in a bad situation if you reneged on your payment. However, you would likely be able to rectify it by offering an alternative, though the cost of the ‘payment’ may have gone up since you broke the original agreement.

Oath: When doing the letter method you decide to make out your letter to Lilith and to ask her for one of her daughters. Your letter intentionally includes an oath to serve Lilith for the rest of your life, regardless of the outcome of the ritual.

If you did that and then decided you weren’t going to serve Lilith because you didn’t get any results from the ritual, you could end up in some major trouble.

Oaths can also be used as payments. In the above example, if you agreed to serve Lilith for sending you her daughter, that would be a payment for the success of the ritual but would also qualify as an oath.

A promise could be made after the ritual. For example, if the ritual succeeded and you were thankful to Lilith, you could promise to do the same ritual for her that you would have done as payment. Since the success of the ritual wasn’t partially dependent on you making that offer to her (as you didn’t make the offer as part of the ritual), it would qualify as a promise. You could still end up pissing something off by not following through if you did back out of it, but the consequences may not be world ending. An oath could also be made after the ritual, often as its own, separate ritual.

Offering some sort of payment isn’t abnormal for a ritual, especially one where you’re summoning something to make a long term agreement with (in our case a relationship). Payments are often a part of the ritual itself. Some might even consider the bodily fluid (regardless of the one you choose to use) used in the letter ritual specifically to be a form of payment, though I’d shy away from this interpretation unless it was specifically offered as such. Oaths, on the other hand, should be avoided with this kind of ritual. You don’t know the spirit lover you’re going to meet yet, dedicating your life (and the next one) to it or some related entity is just foolish.

So, what should we think about before making an oath? We’ve established that oaths are not appropriate when made very early on into your magical practice or when made flippantly or with entities, people, and/or systems you’re not very familiar with at that point. Let’s go in depth to what may help you decide to make an oath.

Should You Make an Oath?

Speaking specifically on the point of an oath that you’d make to a spirit lover, this isn’t a question I, or anyone else, can answer for you to an effective degree. Whether or not you should make an oath depends on your specific experience, what you want in your relationship, life, and the hereafter, and whether or not you feel specifically called to do so. However, there are some points that I think are good to review.

First and most importantly, this entire time I’ve been speaking of oaths as something permanent. This is because they are often made, especially by excited fledglings, without any specific regard for length or a way out. When people feel called to make an oath, they don’t tend to feel a need to add in caveats. They feel so sure that what they’re doing is correct that the idea that they may need to review things a few days, months, or years down the line seems kind of silly.

There is no reason that an oath that you initially make has to be permanent or that it can’t contain some sort of caveat. Want to marry your spirit lover? Include stipulations that would allow the two of you to separate years down the line if something doesn’t work out, or a method to review the oath to see if it’s still serving everyone that’s involved or needs adjustment or revocation. You can also include a specific exit method to make breaking the oath far more painless, such as a phrase that you would say to renounce the oath. This likely sounds callous; after all, if you’re so sure that you want to be with someone forever, why take these kinds of steps? But here’s the thing: If the oath continues to be healthy for everyone involved, you never have to renounce it. If it doesn’t, it would be far better for everyone involved if the exit is as clean as possible.

If that is all you take away form this discussion, you’re already going a long way towards making any oath you make with your spirit lover a lot safer for both of you. However, here are some other areas that may be worth looking at:

Can you see yourself interacting positively with the spirit in question for a great length of time? If your relationship has a lot of ups and downs, if you feel that you’re often pulled away from them or that you have a lot of hang-ups about things, it’s likely a sign that you have a lot of attachments that are pulling you away from your spirit lover that you may need to address first. Most obviously this is competing romance or romantic relationships or a desire to have them, but it can also include family members or friends that are roadblocking your progress, often due to some misguided religious concern for you. If you’re not willing to step away from these things to an almost wholesale degree, going in for an oath is asking for trouble down the line, when those things compete with the relationship.

If you’re reasonably new to the relationship you should also steer clear. The relationship needs some time to mature before you really know if it’s for you in the long run. There are also a lot of strong, positive emotions that happen in the early stages that you shouldn’t solely base your decision off of. Taking a forever-oath is something you should decide to do years down the line. Shorter term oaths however may be fine.

If you feel like you have a lot of unfinished business in terms of your growth as a person/soul, then you should probably steer clear as well. Making progress should bring whether or not you should make an oath more clarity. If you make an oath and then make progress, it may also change your opinion on how appropriate that oath is, leading to breaking the oath and the associated consequences.

If you feel like you have to do a lot of important work in other areas (not in the growth sense), and that your relationship may detract from those, then you may want to make the oath later down the line when those areas are less heavy. In a similar vein, if there are competing spiritual interests then making an oath to your relationship could only make that competition more complex to navigate.

Finally, if you feel afraid or like you aren’t ready to take that step, then you should probably listen to your intuition and hold off. Normally I don’t put too much stock into gut feeling, but when you’re doing something like this I think always leaning towards saying no is better when you don’t have clarity.

With all of that being said, what are signs that you should make a formalized oath and forever commitment to your spirit lover?

I’ll let you know when I get there.

Right now, despite the endless well of goodness that this relationship has brought me, I’m still stuck in some of those roadblocks I’ve outlined above. It would be imprudent for me to make a formalized oath at this point, and if I can have the wherewithal to say that after all of this time, then I’m sure that one day I’ll be able to formalize an ever-lasting commitment if it’s meant to be. When that happens, I’ll let you all know all the things that tipped me off and how that goes. If it doesn’t, I’ll explain that side of things too.

Hate to end things on that more dour note, but my message is this; prudence is key, and prudence does not detract from love. Your relationship isn’t less and your love isn’t less just because you haven’t made an unbreakable oath to your spirit lover yet. Being prudent isn’t a sign that you don’t love someone, it’s a sign that you take your feelings and their feelings seriously and that you want to be sure that you’re making the correct choice. This also means that if you finally do decide it’s time to commit at that level, the oath will be that much more powerful, unmolested by the concerns that you’ve long since overcome. It goes from you saying “I want to love you forever’ to ‘I will love you forever, and I’m sure of it’ at that point. To me that only brings the relationship more beauty, not less.