By: Layla van der Meer, Ritual Oversight Division
Circle Strategist
There are six summoning circles cleared for standard Incursion use. You will have learned this in basic protocol training, unless you were texting your ex under the table.
They are: Dread, Hunger, Despair, Vengeance, Malice, and Fury.
These circles were not chosen at random, but understood through millennia of experimentation. Each one maps to the core emotional resonance of certain Demons – those emotional frequencies that lure a specific class of entity into a full Manifestation and not that half-hearted display beforehand. And if that sentence confused you, stop reading and go ask a handler how a tuning fork works.
So long as training holds, and so long as the correct circle is used for the correct Demon, everything should proceed according to plan. But if you’ve been here more than a week, you already know that if the circle breaks during the ritual, the problem most likely isn’t the circle.
It’s you.
The Role of Emotion (a.k.a. This Is the Part Everyone Skims)
Summoning Circles aren’t chosen because they look pretty. (Though Malice does have a certain charm to it). They are spiritual beacons tuned to a specific kind of emotional charge. That means it’s not enough to carve clean sigils and double-check your salt line. The circle responds to emotional energy. Yours.
Take the Hunger Circle. We use it to summon entities like the Obayifo and the Rakshasa not because they’re both flesh-eaters (though, trust me, they are), but because they’re defined by a bottomless sense of absence.
The Obayifo feeds on suffering and obsession. It hungers not for food, but for what you won’t let go of. The Rakshasa takes identity and dignity the way a starving person takes bread – savoring what it knows you need most. Both are drawn to the ritual emotion of need so severe it eats through reason. That is what Hunger means in the circle.
And here’s the catch: if you don’t embody that feeling – if you can’t channel the gnawing emptiness of real want – the summoning fizzles. Or worse, it skews. Because things worse than your local Demon can be hungry too. And one of them might answer instead.
So Why Do Circles Fail?
Short answer? Distraction.
Long answer? You walked into the most volatile part of a mission and tried to wing it emotionally. The circle demands authentic resonance. That means when you’re standing in Despair, you have to feel despair. Not act it. Not pretend. You reach into your own memory and drag out that moment of failure you never talk about. You let it in. Because if you don’t, the circle echoes hollow. And hollow is an open door for something OTHER than just the Demons in the area.
Even a minor lapse can lead to catastrophic error. During the Sideways Conflagration of 1943, the agent chosen to invoke Fury to confront a Banshee admitted afterward that he had simply tried to “think of something irritating.” The circle fractured. The fire moved laterally. Six casualties, three memory wipe orders, and a street that hasn’t burned the same way since (Ritual Oversight Memo R-511-A, 1943).
So yes. The chalk might be correct. The circle geometry might check out. But if the summoner is thinking about what’s for dinner, or has a crush on someone in the briefing room, you’ve already lost.
No, You Can’t Make Up a New One
Someone tried “Shame” last year.
They are still not allowed to speak unsupervised and their dental x-rays keep revealing extra teeth no matter how many get extracted. It is not clever. It is not experimental. It is how you die without understanding what killed you (Internal Anomaly Debrief T-014, Psychological Oversight, 2021). Yes, other circles exist, but they are specialized cases. We are in an age where we have more knowledge available to us than any Agents throughout the history of the Society. Trust that when the Codex states only six circles are needed, only six are needed. When you get specialized orders, however, you’ll be talking to my division, and see what we really have available.
Final Thought
When in doubt, ask yourself: do I really feel what this circle needs to call the thing I’m hunting?
If not, step out. Get it right. Or someone else gets buried under your bad vibes.
—Layla van der Meer
Circle Strategist
Ritual Oversight Division
References
Ritual Oversight Division. Memo R-511-A: Circle Failure Case File – Sideways Conflagration. Vault Archive, Netherwatch Internal, 1943. Accessed 02 November, 2022.
Psychological Oversight Division. Internal Anomaly Debrief T-014: Post-Shame Circle Exposure (Redacted Subject). Vault Archive, Netherwatch Internal, 2021. Accessed 02 November, 2022.
[Addendum – Editorial Insert from Ritual Oversight Leadership]
While Ms. van der Meer’s post is, as always, vivid and technically correct, it omits the foundational history that would be useful to newer agents and outside researchers viewing this archive.
For a detailed examination of how emotional resonance came to define standard summoning practice, I recommend consulting Chapter 4 of Edvard Harrow’s A Geometry of Will: Symbolic Logic in Ritual Construction, first printed in 1953 and still considered a structural cornerstone in cross-cultural circle theory.
Layla, as discussed, please remember that swearing at the past does not exempt you from citing it.
—Elena Petrova
High Ritualist, Ritual Oversight Division
Additional Reference
Harrow, Edvard. A Geometry of Will: Symbolic Logic in Ritual Construction. Cambridge: Westmere Occult Studies Press, 1953.