### 3.6 Incantation and invocation

**Definitions.** An incantation is authorized or patterned speech believed to exert efficacy; an invocation calls upon or addresses a being or power. Their force in a tradition may depend on speaker, wording, rhythm, setting, lineage, intention, and ritual sequence—not merely semantic content. **Relationship to AI.** A prompt can resemble an incantation because small verbal changes, sequence, repetition, and role specification can alter an opaque system’s response. An anthropological essay explicitly develops this comparison as a way to understand the “magical power” users attribute to prompts [Kornberger, 2026]. Prompt optimization and few-shot instruction effects are empirically real. **The analogy has limits.** A prompt causes a computational response by conditioning a trained model. An incantation’s claimed efficacy may be social, psychological, performative, devotional, or supernatural. Similar form does not prove identical mechanism. “Invoke a persona” is a normal technical instruction to simulate a voice or role; it does not demonstrate that an external person, deity, ancestor, or spirit has entered the model.