Definition
Conjuration carried two distinct legal meanings in old English law, both now obsolete as operative criminal categories:
1. A plot or compact formed by persons who combined by oath to do some public harm — essentially a form of criminal conspiracy distinguished by the solemnity of the oath binding its members.
2. The offense of having conference or commerce with evil spirits for the purpose of discovering a secret or accomplishing some end — a supernatural crime prosecuted alongside witchcraft, enchantment, and sorcery under early English statute.
Both senses reflect a legal order in which oath-breaking, occult practice, and subversion of public order were treated as cognizable offenses rather than theological or folkloric categories. Neither meaning survives as an active criminal charge in any modern common law jurisdiction.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Conjuring, legerdemain, or magic; a magic trick; the act of summoning by a sacred name or solemn oath; a league for a criminal purpose; conspiracy.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of calling or summoning by a sacred name or in solemn manner; the act of binding by an oath; earnest entreaty or adjuration; the invocation of supernatural aid through magical words; incantation and enchantment.
The gap between common and legal usage is historically narrow but meaningfully distinct in emphasis. Ordinary usage centered on the ceremonial or theatrical act — the utterance, the summons, the enchantment as performance. Legal usage focused on the legal consequences of that act: criminal liability for the compact formed under oath, or for the commerce with spirits as an offense against public order. The common understanding treats conjuration as something a person does; the legal understanding treated it as something a person was guilty of.
---
Common Confusion
Conjuration, witchcraft, enchantment, and sorcery were grouped together by Blackstone as related supernatural offenses but were treated as technically distinct categories by other legal writers of the period. The distinctions were never settled into a clean taxonomy. In practice, the terms were often used interchangeably in indictments and commentary, making precise doctrinal differentiation difficult to reconstruct from historical sources. Researchers should not assume that a source using one term excludes the others, nor that any systematic line between them was consistently maintained.
The first definition — a conspiratorial compact under oath — overlaps substantially with the general law of conspiracy and with the offense of unlawful assembly. Conjuration in this sense is best understood as a heightened or ceremonially aggravated form of conspiracy rather than a wholly independent offense.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Conjuration is a term a researcher encounters, not one they search for as living law. Its research value is almost entirely historical: it appears in English criminal law materials spanning roughly the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries and surfaces in colonial American legal records where English supernatural offense categories were imported, adapted, or selectively enforced.
Several navigational points matter:
The dual meaning creates indexing ambiguity. In older digests and abridgments, conjuration as conspiracy may be indexed under criminal law generally, while conjuration as a supernatural offense may appear under witchcraft or ecclesiastical law headings. Anderson's Dictionary of Law simply redirects to witchcraft — a reminder that historical sources did not always treat the term as warranting independent analysis.
The statutory anchor matters for dating. Burrill cites Statute 6 Eliz. c. 16 as the operative English authority for the supernatural offense. Researchers working with Elizabethan and Jacobean materials should key to that statute and its successors, including the Witchcraft Act 1604 (1 Jac. 1, c. 12), which broadened criminal liability for occult practices. The Witchcraft Act 1735 effectively ended prosecution of these offenses in England by reframing the issue from genuine supernatural commerce to fraudulent pretense.
Colonial American researchers should note that the legal category traveled unevenly. Some colonies enacted their own witchcraft statutes; others relied on common law or English statute. Conjuration as a distinct term appears with varying frequency across colonial court records, and its presence or absence in a given jurisdiction's records reflects local legislative choices as much as prosecutorial patterns.
The conspiracy-adjacent meaning has more durable research relevance. Materials on seditious conspiracy, unlawful oaths, and combinations in restraint of trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may use conjuration or cognate terms to describe collective oath-bound conduct. Researchers working on labor combination cases or political conspiracy prosecutions from this period should watch for the term appearing in a non-supernatural context.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in close agreement — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill reproduce nearly identical text, all drawing on Cowell's Interpreter as the primary authority and Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Comm. 60) as secondary support. Anderson contributes nothing independent, redirecting the reader to witchcraft without elaboration.
The convergence on Cowell is significant: John Cowell's Interpreter (1607) is itself a product of the same Jacobean legal moment that produced the 1604 Witchcraft Act, and its definitions reflect the heightened official concern with occult practice under James I. Researchers relying on these dictionary entries are, in effect, reading a Jacobean legal understanding filtered through nineteenth-century American legal lexicography.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the procedural mechanics of prosecution, the evidentiary standards applied, the relationship between ecclesiastical and temporal jurisdiction over these offenses, or the decline and formal abolition of the category. They preserve the offense's definition without its legal history. Blackstone's own discussion at 4 Bl. Comm. 60 is the more useful starting point for understanding how the category functioned within the broader criminal law framework.
Burrill's inclusion of the Latin conjuratio is a useful reminder that the term has a civil law presence as well — in Roman and canon law contexts, conjuratio referred to a sworn compact or oath-bound league, closer to the conspiracy sense than the supernatural one. Researchers working in ecclesiastical or canon law sources should be alert to this usage.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Conjuration as an operative criminal offense does not exist in any current American, English, or Commonwealth jurisdiction. England abolished supernatural offense categories in substance by 1735 and in form by subsequent repeal. American jurisdictions never systematically codified the category, and it did not survive the transition from colonial to post-revolutionary law. Researchers encountering the term in modern materials are almost certainly reading historical quotation or antiquarian reference rather than live doctrine.
---