(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)
Creating Servitors
Modern magicians have expanded on Jungian ideas of the collective
unconscious to assert that magick occurs within what Spare
calls the sub-consciousness, and Fries the Deep Mind. Servitors
are semi-autonomous beings that are summoned from the Deep
Mind and charged with the per- formance of some magickal task.
Stephen Mace, in his monograph Stealing the Fire from Heaven,
calls this sorcery. He defines it:
"Sorcery is the art of
capturing spirits and training them to work in harness, of
sorting out the powers in our minds so we might manipulate
them and make them cause changes both within our minds and
beyond them."
Most writers are unanimous in their opinion that the magician
must develop a clear statement of intent before proceeding
in acts of magick, which presupposes the magician understanding
the nature of their original desire. In many cases there is
simply no need to create a servitor. A simple spell might
suffice, a desire sigilized and cast into the Deep Mind in
a state of vacuity. Summoning servitors for the sake of psychic
adventure might also be ill advised, although, judging from
the grimoires of medieval literature in the absence of television
it was a popular way to pass the tedium of an evening. Teenage
satinists (so called in tribute to their innovative spelling)
are also apparently fond of this sport. Chaos magicians, it
is to be hoped, and the readers of this essay, would create
servitors for more practical reasons.
If the magician does not believe
the desire can be actualized by sigilizing, either because
of lack of success in the past, the inability of the sorcerer
to forget the desire, or because the task is repetitive, or
complex then a servitor may be appropriate. Servitors can
be used for finding rare books, for developing sales in business,
for aiding in gaining employment, for irritating an enemy,
for protecting a house, for, really, any number of jobs. Servitors
can also be used to aid in the deconstruction and reconstruction
of a magician's personality. On the zee-list servitors have
been described that compress and expand time, that attack
spam mailers, that assist in speedy passage through rush hour
and that are soldiers in magickal wars.
I suggested above that the
use of servitors is widespread throughout humankind. Magicians
and sorcerers, however, consciously create servitors, extruding
them from their own psyches for specific magickal purposes.
Most people create servitors unconsciously. Sometimes, as
I recounted, this can have poisonous results both for the
creator of the servitor and for society. Servitors that contain
elements of personality that the sorcerer finds maladaptive
are usually known as demons. Mace writes in regards to demons:
"Demons: reflexes that
generate uncontrollable moods, fantasies, and even actions.
Demons are often acquired as a response to a twisted environment
that had to be endured during the weakness and dependence
of childhood. The adult, empowered wizard will realize they
are inappropriate to his current situation, and make every
effort to bind them so they will no longer bother him."
In fact bound demons can be quite useful.
Since many servitors are available
for use by the magician through grimoires, or the use of elementals,
sylphs, incubi, and the like, it might be reasonably inquired
why the sorcerer should go to the trouble of creating one.
Mace answers this:
"there's a problem with
using preexisting spirits. They invariably come equipped with
enormous amounts of moral and theological baggage, bundles
of belief and righteousness that you must carry with you as
you make your way through the world."
I suggest readers who question this use a grimoire to evoke
a lesser demon like Belphegor (not an archdemon like Belial),
visit a channeller, or a medium for a seance. Apart from entertainment
value I doubt that the reader will experience significant
or lasting change from these experiences. Belphegor, I should
note, has been credited with assuring regular bowel movements,
so perhaps he might have a lasting effect on constipated mages.
Apart from this possible exception, creating a servitor and
charging it with a magickal task can have a profound effect
on a sorcerer's life.
This is why a fairly rigorous
intellectual analysis of the desire of the sorcerer should
be undertaken before evocation. The magician can use any number
of techniques to do this, but the discussion of the magickal
intent with other sorcerers is probably the most helpful.
This is especially true when the servitor to be created is
to effect a change in the personality of the magician since
it is very possible that excising an apparent vice may also
remove an intertwined virtue leaving the sorcerer weaker and
poorer than before.
Once the magickal intent has
been determined and the magician is fairly sure that no unwitting
damage to the psyche will ensue, then the actual process of
creating a servitor can begin.
Servitors can be easily divided
into two classes, those that come from identifiable areas
of the magician's psyche, and those that issue forth from
the deeper levels of the subconsciousness ( and hence may
not be recognizable to the magician as deriving from a property
of the sorcerer's psyche). If, for example I create a servitor
to afflict an enemy this can be easily seen to originate in
my own rage. On the other hand, if I summon an elemental because
I want rain this spirit may have no apparent connection with
my own psyche. Of course it does, but perhaps at such a deep
level that it is held in common by many others. Ghosts are
another example of beings that issue forth from deep levels
of the subconsciousness and are often perceived in very similar
ways by different people. Whether the sorcerer creates a servitor
from scratch, as it were, or summons a preexistent spirit
may depend on the task to which the servitor is put. Servitors
may also be created which have components of both the individual
magician's psyche and of the Deep Mind.
I'm in business for myself
and my business depends on the timely receipt of payments.
I'm in the process of creating a servitor to facilitate payments
made to me through the mail. The servitor I imagine to look
like Zippy the U.S.P.S. mascot but carrying a large hand gun
- Zippy the psychotic Postal Worker. He will be charged with
the specific job of speeding up my mail, particularly checks
to me. Of course, part of Psycho Zippy is budded off from
my own personality and includes my frustration with the mail,
my anxiety over money, my dislike of bureaucrats, and my own
violent tendencies. Part of Psycho Zippy, though, comes from
the good work of the USPS's advertising staff who imbedded
this image in the American consciousness and the American
media that publicized the mass murders of numerous postal
workers by their coworkers over the last few years. Psycho
Zippy is a hybrid servitor in this sense, and so will derive
its energy from both sources. Psycho Zippy may also be considered
a bound demon, since he derives from obsessive (and maladaptive)
elements of my own psychology which have been extruded and
harnessed to perform a particular role. The development of
this servitor is useful therapy since it frees me from these
maladaptive elements.
So let's review the process
of creating a servitor like Psycho Zippy. First I become conscious
of obsession, manifesting as a repeating pattern of anxious
thoughts about payments which I know have been mailed but
which for reasons quite beyond my ability to understand take
a random number of days to reach me. This obsession clearly
indicates a desire...I want my payments in a timely and consistent
fashion. Now I could do a sigil to actualize this desire,
but the problem is persistent and I doubt that a sigil done
once will be enough to solve it. I could also use a godform,
like Ganesh, or Hermes, or Legba or even Nyarlathotep, but
I've tried this and the gods seem fairly fickle about it,
and, in any case, I keep having to go back to them to bargain
with them every time a payment gets lost. I have concluded
that a servitor, charged by my own obsession, is the most
appropriate magickal response.
Now in my case the USPS's
admen have come up with a sigil that I only have to modify
by adding a large hand gun. For many servitors, however, it
may be necessary to develop them from scratch by first forming
your magickal intention into a sigil and then using your imagination
to turn this sigil into the shape of servitor (which can be
anything you consider appropriate to the task at hand). This
process is greatly facilitated if you have developed a magickal
alphabet that contains in sigil form the properties of your
personality and the powers of your mind. Automatic drawing,
a common way to develop this type of alphabet, can also be
used to develop the shape of the servitor. These alphabets
are also known as alphabets of desire.
On Alphabets of Desire Mace
writes:
"Each letter (actually
an ideograph) represents a power...an unconscious structure
or variety of energy that the sorcerer recognizes or wishes
to recognize within his deep psyche."
In essence the sorcerer sigilizes a desire and then uses automatic
drawing until an ideograph is created that is, as Mace says,
"perfectly apropos." Letters from this alphabet
can be combined to form the shape of a servitor, again using
techniques of automatic drawing.
An alphabet of desire is a
set of personal magickal symbols that describe or trigger
certain powers of the mind or aspects of the sorcerer's personality.
Although the AoD is generally considered to be graphical there
isn't any reason it can't be gestural, or a set of sounds,
or a group of familiar emotional states or states of consciousness.
The construction of an alphabet of desire also does not need
to be nearly as formal as suggested by Spare, Carroll, Phil
Hine, Jan Fries, Stephen Mace and others. It can develop organically
as a result of, for example, repetitive gestures or sounds
a sorcerer makes in rituals. Moreover, it is not necessary
for the sorcerer to be able to define the elements of the
AoD outside of the ritual space. The conscious mind does not
have to know the meanings and attributions of the alphabet
since the sorcerer uses it in an altered state of consciousness
induced by ritual.
FireClown and I, who have
similar varieties of magick, actually don't have much of a
conscious understanding of our personal alphabets of desire,
which are linked more to repetitive gestures, sounds, and
subtle states of consciousness rather than graphic symbols.
Although most sorcerers working
in the tradition of AOSpare are indebted to the theoretical
structure he developed, slavish adherence to Spare's techniques
would be quite contrary to what Spare himself would have wanted.
Of course, if you want to
create servitors from graphical sigils then an iconic alphabet
of desire will certainly help.
The impetus to begin writing
this much postponed essay was prompted by a question from
a member of the zee-list, a list for the use of the z(cluster),
a loose international association of chaos magicians, ontological
anarchists, and the like, primarily mediated through the internet.
A listmember posted the following
question:
>In my work with sigilizing
desire, I have frequently come
>across strange beings which seem related to the sigils.
Sometimes,
>these beings have names and its gematrias are relevant
to the object
>of desire. What are these beings? Can I create servitors
out of them?
As the reader will have probably
gathered, the original question that precipitated this essay
has now been answered. In sigilizing desires the magician
inadvertently encountered servitors that were in some way
born from these sigils. The magician now needs to discover
what these servitors are, what their relationship is to the
Deep Mind and how they can be used.
Other relevant questions relating
to servitors concern servitor dependency and using a bound
demon's energy to reinforce personality elements that the
magician wants to strengthen. I'll deal with these questions
as this essay continues.
In creating servitors, once
the magickal intention has been formulated an appropriate
container for it can be developed. This can be a sigilized
figure, an amulet or talisman, a fetish, a computer program
or script, or even, possibly, an electronic pet. I advise
against using living creatures as containers for servitors,
partly because of their complexity, and partly because it
is done all too often by parents wih their children, owners
with their pets and bosses with their employees, to mention
just a few cases where human beings extrude parts of their
own psyches and attempt to ram them into other human beings.
Manchurian candidates notwithstanding most attempts to do
this are qualified failures. Animal familiars, such as cats,
are arguably not servitors at all, but rather, associates
of the magician or witch, voluntarily participating in magickal
work.
There is some argument that
a material base for a servitor may not be necessary, but,
as Phil Hine points out:
"It does help to further construct the Servitor's persona
as an individual entity, and is also useful for focusing on
when you are recalling the Servitor for reabsorption or reprogramming."
Let's return to my Psycho-Zippy servitor. Zippy-with-a-gun
is designed to speed checks written to me through the U.S.Postal
Service. I do not need to time limit the existence of this
servitor since the problem is evidently continuous. I have
decided that Zippy-with-a- gun should have a specific aetheric
shape, which will be attached to a material link. This link
will be an envelope with Psycho-Zippy's icon in the place
of a stamp. The envelope will be addressed to me and will
contain a check payable to me for as much money as I want
and signed by the Universe. This envelope talisman will live
on my altar and will also be a resting place for Psycho-Zippy
when he's not out terrorizing postal and U.P.S. employees
into sending me my checks. I've also developed a list of instructions
for Psycho-Zippy constraining him to this one task, of facilitating
payments through the mail. I don't, obviously, want Psycho-Zippy
infecting a postal worker with the notion that murdering as
many of his coworkers as possible before blowing his own brains
out would be a fine way to spend the day.
These are the preliminary
tasks that need to be done before launching the servitor.
Phil Hine suggests a servitor design checklist including deciding
general and specific intents; sigilizing the initial desire;
deciding whether time factor, material link, name, or a specific
shape is needed; deciding what will happen when the task is
completed; and, finally, making a list of instructions.
Again this is a fairly formalistic
approach to developing servitors, and I have to admit that
most of the time I use servitors that are nameless, have no
particular shape, no material link, and are created almost
instantaneously for a specific purpose. Over a period of time
these servitors have taken on personalities, or at least the
shadows of such, if I use them repetitively. I have a few
of them I send out to speed me through traffic jams. I have
another that gets me tables in crowded restaurants before
I walk through the door. I didn't develop these beings, but
as a result of repeating spells (through gesture and sound)
to achieve these results the servitors just seemed to develop
of their own accord. Since I don't banish servitors but house
them when their tasks are completed I think I have a pack
of shiftless, and probably loutish servitors hanging around
my aetheric environment who leap into action when I need them.
My demons need work.
(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)
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