Many good takes here I'm in sympathy with.
I tend to look at this issue of whatever the hell is ritually "correct" in two ways, that sits somewhere in the middle of Neoplatonism and pure animism. For a nuanced take on what that animism looks like, I highly recommend Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's work on Perspectivism (thanks to Gordon White for the introduction).
Perspectivism suggest, basically, all spirits look human to themselves. When a jaguar in the forest sees you, as long as you are in eye contact, you will look like another human. This is what De Castro calls Multinaturalism. Once you look away from the jaguar , you might look like a boar to her. When she kills you and drinks your blood, to her she is drinking fermented beer, while you are an ex-human. This example is from De Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics. To the jaguar, her "nature" shows her that the liquid she consumes is beer. It is only from the human perspective that is your blood. Ritual, ceremony, is one way how we place ourselves in relation to a predator-spirit - it helps us maintain eye contact.
Perspectivism also suggest they can' even see you until you mythologize yourself and your tools. In case some were wondering why we grim trad magicans we consecrate eveything, and outselves, , to take on mythoolgical roles, that's a very good way to think of it so it doesn't look so bizarre.
What I take away from this dovetails very nicely with Neoplatonism, which takes a different view of the same dynamic. Neoplatonism posits that the spirits are daimons that partake of the middle ground between us and The Mystery (here called the Neoplatonic One), which is necessary to communicate with you in ways you can understand. They will be, in a sense, a mix of you and whatever The Mystery is.
Both of these, in my opinion re useful operative models for spirit evocation. In Vodou, there is a technique where a spirit's packet is placed in a hole in the ground along with a metal pole that reaches above the ground. A bonfire is built around the pole. This is an example of the use of materia having a visible effect on the type of manifestation you get that "heats up" the spirit. Modern magic mental evocation is missing out on a huge repertoire of traditional techniques. Similarly, one can offer honey and water to "cool" them. There is a time and place for this dynamic as well.
How you look at these traditional sorcery techniques depends greatly on your cosmological viewpoint. Are you changing the nature of your inner landscape - your mental world in the Hermetic Chain of Manifestation - so the spirit comes through differently? Or are you changing the nature of the environment that they are building their body from? Or are you changing the nature of where you are in relation to the spirit? Perhaps it is a bit of all of them?
In the end, it does not matter. These are all ways of looking at the kind of relationship that will arise if you take up the practice of spirit evocation.
So to that the end, I encourage everyone to try the grimoires.
I am not even sure why people who do not use them and want to argue about them even care, except that they are a bit of an anomaly from modern magic approaches, with weird languages and piety.
What has happened in the last decade is the rise of Diabolist Pagans who have a hard time with the language and get a bit spiteful about anything that sounds Christian to them. I’m not a grimoire purist - change around the rites a bit - but I am a grimoire fundamentalist - know why they are there first. If you change them, you will get different manifestations , that are probably not even the same being anymore.
I was just saying this elsewhere. "Demon" is no more a catch-all for them all together than "pagan god." They are Legion. In my view, Astaroth of the Lesser Key is NOT the Astaroth of the GV. The name is the same, but the seal and the rites are totally different. This matters. The manifestations are totally different. Magicians can make anything work, but some things work better.
Why this is the case, I have my suspicions, but you can think of each of the grimoires as a radio that transmits a particular frequency to a specific class of daimons. You can change out parts of the radio, but not so much that it becomes a toaster. The grims are not really widgets, although I sometimes talk about them that way. They are a language. They are a culture. And there are spirits that oversee them and transmit them.
I was recently talking about the GV's Prayer of Success, the Astrachios Prayer. In my use of it, I have found it to be "linked up" in ways that other words and names may not be. It is a litany of entity names, and I swapped out Silat... who might be the name of a demoness, with Syrach, because he is a key figure in the GV. The name has an internal integrity with the structure of the GV.
For some reason, , in my experience, this prayer seems to have worn a groove in the universe. Parts of it are scattered through the grimoires. Yes, I know this is very anecdotal, and I hate making any fast rules, but I will say incorporating it as a sort of ongoing mantra has often led to much more dramatic manifestations. I would say it on the long drive to and from the studio.
Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields suggest that things that have happened already have an uptick in probability of happening again, something he calls Morphic Resonance. According to Sheldrake, the more a specific action or pattern is repeated - and we can speculate here, like a ritual or a prayer - the more your success is reinforced by a "memory" in the field of that practice, created by all the times over the centuries it has been used.
