The Practice of Magical Evocation
Franz Bardon

Merkur Publishing Company 2001, ISBN 1-88592-813-0

If you want to be strict about it, it is rather pointless to review this book on its own - after all, the theories and techniques for magical evocation that Bardon describes in it are directly based on his first and most important publication, "Initiation into Hermetics". A review of his complete system would lead too far however. Saying that the "Practice of Magical Evocation" should be very difficult to understand without at least basic knowledge of "Initiation into Hermetics" must therefore suffice.
This book is an early attempt at freeing the rather obscure field of magical evocation from the excess baggage of medieval ritualism and offering a simple, coherent ritual theory for it. Bardon is far from having done this work on his own, but the clarity of his result, mostly rid of traditionalisms, is still remarkable. After reading this, the reader is not only capable of employing workable and pleasantly simple evocation magic, but will also have learned enough background information to be able to modify the ritual instruction in a reasonable way or develop rituals from scratch.
Sadly, doing the latter is absolutely necessary. Only little less than in his "Initiation into Hermetics", in this book Bardon is dogmatic and rigid to the point of making the ritual instruction almost impossible to carry out in its literal sense. Anyone up to practising Bardons ritual magic has to decide between doing decades of preliminary concentration and meditation exercises, and ignoring large numbers of rules and warnings (mostly in "Initiation"). The, well, more efficient latter option is probably hard to take for relative beginners in magic, which is why this book is not recommendable for them.
Overall, the "Practice of Magical Evocation" should be very useful for advanced practitioners interested in evocation magic. In a lot of ways, it is even the best book available on this rarely seriously dealt with subject. Its peculiarity in content and style makes it hardly accessible for beginners, which is likely intentional but still lessens the value of the book. In the second part of "Practice", the author indexes several hundreds of entities with sigils and short descriptions. Many have criticized Bardon for basically making those up using several not very magical methods. For modern magical practice, such considerations are not relevant and in fact, Bardon's entities as well as his techniques can be successfully worked with.