(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 1)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 2)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 3)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 4)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 5)
Servitors
Servitors, Psychodynamics
and Models of Magick
Chaos Magick, at least if approached by through the internet
and conversation with chaos magicians, can appear a sprawling,
contradictory mess of techniques to the newcomer. The relativistic
stance of Chaos Magick, and it's apparent lack of a unifying
template can appear both morally disturbing and intellectually
frustrating, especially to occultists coming to it from more
traditional paths. Frater U.D., in a small essay published
in 1991, provided a clearer approach to chaos magick by declaring
it to be a meta-model, a fifth approach to magick. The other
four he defined as the Spirit Model (used by shamans and traditional
ceremonial magicians, in which autonomous entities exist in
a dimension accessible to ours through altered states of consciousness);
the Energy Model (where the world is viewed as being 'vitalized'
by energy currents that the magician manipulates); the Psychological
Model (in which the magician is seen as "a programmer
of symbols and different states of consciousness," manipulating
the the individual and the deep psyche); and the information
model (where information is the code that programs the essentially
neutral energy of the life force). Frater U.D. points out
that writers on chaos magick generally subscribe to a great
extent to the Psychological Model, but, their approach utilizes
a Meta-Model, which is really a set of instructions on how
to use the other models. One of the most salient facts about
chaos magick, and one of the most difficult for many newcomers
to grasp, is that it is not really a magickal philosophy at
all, it is really a technology, an approach, or stance towards
magickal systems. The path to this was a result of chaos magicians
developing and then transcending the Psychological Model.
This essay on servitors while discussing many of the practical
issues in the creation and deployment of servitors also elucidates
the relationship between chaos magickal theory and modern
psychology.
Modern magicians, chaos magicians, contemporary sorcerers,
and the other magickal users of servitors appear to have adopted
a modified psychodynamic view of personality, and the way
in which we identify ourselves. This view, first expounded
by Freud and the other founders of psychoanalysis (Jung, Adler,
etc.), suggests that the way in which we view ourselves develops
over time, and motivational syndromes (what we want and how
we go about getting it) are critical to this development.
This is quite a different view than type or trait personality
theories which were in favor throughout most of Western history
(man is composed of a compound of four or five elements, for
example). Chaos magicians tend to display more of a situationist
stance to personality, that is to say they tend to act as
though the situation in which one finds oneself is the dominant
factor in observable behaviors. Chaos magicians also tend
to suggest that this is a good thing, since it means the personality
can be used opportunistically, as a tool to achieve desires.
This stance also reflects Buddhist and Eastern views of the
Self, which either repudiate its existence as a permanent
construction, or state that its essential nature can only
be discovered through profoundly altered states of consciousness
(samadhi).
Phil Hine, in his excellent
pamphlet "Chaos Servitors, a User Guide" writes
of the self:
"I prefer the analogy
of the self as an organic city-entity, where some portions
are more prominent than others, where there are hidden tunnels
and sewers, and where the under levels carry vital energies
to buildings. The city-self is continually changing and growing
- tear down a building of belief, and another grows back in
its place."
Austin Osman Spare was clearly influenced by psychodynamic
theories of the self, as well as Eastern ones, and the general
magickal theory he passed on to us embody these ideas. Primarily
concerned with motivation (desire), Spare wrote in "The
Book of Pleasure":
"The 'self' is the 'Neither-Neither,' nothing omitted,
indissoluble, beyond prepossession; dissociation of conception
by its own invincible love is the only true, safe, and free...This
Self-Love is now declared by me the means of evolving millions
of ideas for pleasure without love, or its synonyms-self-reproach,
sickness, old age, and death. The Symposium of self and love.
O! Wise Man, Please Thyself."
Note the combination of psychoanalytic vocabulary and Vedic
metaphysics combined with an insistence on motivation as fundamental.
Now a servitor is generally
considered to be a part of the personality of the magician
that has been severed from him. I would argue that this is
a limited view of servitors, that they could be considered
severed portions of the Deep Mind, and consequently not located
in the psyche of any particular magician. In my view demons,
angels, imaginary friends, poltergeists and perhaps even ghosts
are servitors. Servitors can be called thought-forms (as opposed
to godforms which may sometimes be servitors on steroids).
Since contemporary magickal
stances to personality are psychodynamic and motivational
servitors tend to be viewed as functional entities, and rather
easily operated. Contrast this with the type and trait theories
that inform Traditional Ceremonial Magick. Magicians up until
this century (and still some today) spend what seems to me
ridiculous amounts of time and effort evoking demons, using
grimoires, and engaging in a paraphernalia of magick that
makes a great deal of sense if you believe in type and trait
theories of personalities, but very little if your approach
is situational and pyschodynamic. If you believe that a demon
you summon is a wholly independent entity with a personality
type all of its own you may have to resort to extreme measures
to force it to do your bidding. If you believe that a demon
is a servitor summoned as a manifestation of your desire then
a simple bargain will suffice (I'll give you energy, you get
what I want, I'll give you a nice place to live).
What is a Servitor?
Motivational syndromes (desire) are fundamental to Spare's
form of magick, hence the name of his most popular book, "The
Book of Pleasure." Spare and magicians, Chaos or otherwise,
have adopted the Jungian expansion of Freud's theory of the
Unconscious. Jung theorized the existence of a collective
unconscious, shared by all. He considered it to be transpersonal
and the residue of the evolution of humankind. I personally
prefer Jan Fries' term, the Deep Mind, but it comes to much
the same thing. Spare, who called the collective unconscious
the sub-consciousness characterized it as follows:
"Know the sub-consciousness
to be an epitome of all experiences and wisdom, past incarnations
as men, animals, birds, vegetable life, etc. , etc., everything
that exists, has and ever will exist."
Both Spare and Peter Carroll attempted to develop a technical
vocabulary to describe the phenomena and techniques of the
type of magick posited by Spare. Carroll, both FireClown and
I believe, was trying to construct a vocabulary that could
be used by magicians of any type. FireClown calls this a "discussional
template", or a way in which, for example, thelemites
could talk to wiccans without misunderstanding each other.
Unfortunately Carroll's use of the hierarchical gambit resulted
in this vocabulary becoming exclusionary.
A fine example of this is
the term "servitor." The time predates Chaos Magick
and can be found to refer to bound spirits in the fiction
of Clark Ashton Smith, who was writing for Weird Tales in
the 1930s. Servitor is actually a word referring to entities
that actualize through evocation, a magickal technique as
old as magick itself. Carroll writes
"These beings have a
legion of names drawn from the demonology of many cultures:
elementals, familiars, incubi, succubi, bud-wills, demons,
atavisms, wraiths, spirits, and so on."
Spare seems to indicate that these entities are bound to obsessions,
that is to say the magician, experiencing an obsession (a
way the psyche tells the magician that it desires something),
forms part of the sub-consciousness into a semi-independent
phenomenon that will do the work needed to actualize the magician's
desire. Carroll disagrees somewhat, although he allows that
such beings have their origin in the human mind. Phil Hine
whose interest in his User's Guide to Servitors is the creation
of such beings writes:
"By deliberately budding
off portions of our psyche and identifying them by means of
a name, trait, symbol, we can come to work with them (and
understand how they affect us) at a conscious level."
So at least in the type of magick developed by Spare, Carroll,
and Phil Hine, a servitor is a part of the magician's psyche,
or a part of the Deep Mind that the magician evokes to perform
a task. Do these entities have an existence prior to their
evocation? Perhaps. Magick is trans-temporal, trans-spatial.
If the Deep Mind contains all experience that has been or
ever will be then the question is meaningless, or as Blake
wrote:
"Everything that can
be Believed is an Image of the Truth."
I do think that the use of servitors is widespread among many
people who would not dream of considering themselves magicians.
People personalize their cars, have imaginary friends as children,
or give personalities to their toys, carry objects they consider
to be "lucky" with them or allow their obsessions
to absorb their personalities so they turn into demons. Many
movies deal with servitors, Natural Born Killers being an
obvious example, Tetsudo, a fine Japanese flick being an even
more obvious example. In NBK the demons are eventually reintegrated
and the two killers stop killing. The fine film Seven is essentially
a magickal ritual in which the murderer uses people as the
material bases for servitors, in this case representing the
demons of the Seven Deadly Sins.
To my mind these are all examples
of the use of servitors because they follow Hine's simple
definition of servitors as budded off portions of the psyche
or personality developed for a simple or complex purpose which
gain a semi-independent existence. Of course in the case of
demons absorbing the personality the act is hardly adaptive,
although it may have started out that way.
I'll tell you a story. I had
a friend about 12 years ago, a charming, handsome young man,
intelligent, athletic, and sober. He used to baby-sit another
friend's teenage daughter. It turned out that he was a serial
rapist. He would stalk women, rape them, and beat them nearly
to death. He got caught because he fell asleep in his car
outside his last victim's apartment and was found by the police
covered with his victim's blood. I have no doubt he would
have ended up murdering his future victims. Fortunately he
is unlikely to ever have that chance.
Now what I think had happened
with this man was that, perhaps as a result of some inability
to integrate his rage towards women, he budded off a part
of his personality, the violent, woman hating part, which
became a demon, a semi-independent servitor. When his obsession
was triggered it activated the demon which then completely
possessed him and he became an utterly different person. For
all I know he wasn't even conscious of the demon himself.
None of his friends ever saw
this demon, didn't even have a glimpse, but his victims surely
did.
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 1)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 2)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 3)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 4)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 5)
Authors Details: By Marik (MarkDeFrates,
marik[at]aol.com)
Unknown Web Site |
|
