Invocation, in ceremonial magic, is the complement of evocation: rather than calling a spirit to appear outside, the magician seeks to draw a deity, force or spiritual presence into or upon themselves, so as to be filled with, inspired by, or temporarily identified with it. The distinction is old but was sharpened in the modern magical revival, where invocation became bound up with the idea of assuming a god-form, deliberately taking on, in imagination and posture, the shape and attributes of a deity, a technique the Golden Dawn drew in part from its reading of Egyptian material.
Aleister Crowley made the aspiration to invoke one's own Holy Guardian Angel, the higher or true self, the central aim of his system. The practice shares a family resemblance with religious phenomena of possession and inspiration, though its practitioners frame it within a magical and often psychological understanding of the mind.