Summoning Circle / Prayer Circle

About

Summoning Circle is an exploitable emojipasta used to make a circle of candles around something or someone the participant wants to summon.

Origin

In Wicca and other related magic rituals a circle is used as a protective barrier for the magician and the summoned.^[5]
Traditionally, circles were believed by ritual magicians to form a protective barrier between themselves and what they summoned.^[6] Twitter user parodied this practice with emojis.

On February 26th, Twitter user Mashihology^[2] created the first known example of the candle emoji circle, summoning magnum. They tweeted "summoning circle, hope this works" (shown below). The tweet gained 122 retweets and 336 likes in two weeks.

Spread

On February 26th, 2019 the trend spread. Twitter user @districtbangtan^[1] summoned the South Korean actor Jisung. The tweet only gained 15 likes in two weeks (shown below, left). On March 1st, Twitter user @introjunghwan^[3] tweeted, "summoning circle, hope this works" with junghwan encased in candles (shown below, right). The tweet gained 55 retweets and 175 likes in a week.

Twitter users began using alternative emojis or jokes surrounding the trend. On March 6th, @DeusSexPH^[4] tweeted candle emojis in an ordered pattern saying "oh fuck i summoned Marie Kondo" (shown below, left). The tweet gained 2,100 retweets and 15,500 likes in two days. On March 7th, Twitter user @pinkpiscesmoon^[5] showed an attempt to summon "a cure for being" clumsy indicating some candles were knocked over with the fire emoji (shown below, right). The tweet gained 240 retweets and 800 likes in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References