(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)
Launching Servitors - Banishing Rituals
Almost all modern authors strongly recommend the use of Banishing
Rituals prior to engaging in any magickal ritual. The word
"banishing" in this concept is something of a misnomer
since the purpose of this technique is to center the magician
within a sacred space, banishing negative influences being
a secondary effect of a banishing ritual.
Uncle Al (Aleister Crowley)
writes:
"The first task of the magician in every ceremony is
therefore to render his circle absolutely impregnable...If
you leave even a single spirit within the circle, the effect
of the conjuration will be entirely absorbed by it."
Now that's certainly definite enough. And a wonderful declamatory
statement it is!
Crowley's banishing rituals
include The Star Ruby (Liber XXV) and The Star Sapphire (Liber
XXXVI), although he assumes that his readers have an understanding
of the most famous banishing ritual, the Lesser Banishing
Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP). One of the clearest descriptions
of this can be found in Donald Michael Kraig's "Modern
Magick." The LBRP and its derivatives involve invoking
godforms or angels at the corners of the compass as protective
agents.
Chaos Magicians, such as Peter
Carroll, Phil Hine and Stephen Mace, also strongly suggest
the use of banishing rituals, although their centering techniques
are somewhat simpler. Phil Hine suggests that banishing rituals
are necessary because they allow entry into altered states
of consciousness, they dispel psychic debris, and the act
to order the universe symbolically, allowing the magician
to stand at the axis mundi. Peter Carroll writes that a well
cosntructed banishing ritual enables the magician to:
"resist obsession if
problems are encountered with dream experiences or with sigils
becoming conscious."
By the latter Carroll clearly is referring to the inadvertent
creation of servitors through sigil techniques. It also has
the advantage of having a basis in Spare's theory of magick
and the transformation of obsessional energy into organic
energy.
Carroll, Hine and Mace all
suggest magicians develop a glowing magickal barrier around
them when engaged in ritual. Carroll and the IOT used the
Gnostic Pentagram Ritual(GPR), a deconstruction of the LBRP,
in magickal work.
Curiously I have not been
able to discover if Austin Osman Spare used banishing rituals.
The omission of such from his "Book of Pleasure"
may quite likely be deliberate since he was certainly aware
of them. I would suggest that Spare may have considered banishing
rituals contrary to the free flow of magickal symbolism from
the Deep Mind to the magician's psyche, that is to say an
artifact that may not be useful. But Spare's magick, to this
day, remains more radical, more controversial, and more audacious
than most practiced by modern magicians.
Is banishing actually necessary?
I do it in an abbreviated form, singing the vowels (Eeh-Aye-Aah-Oh-Uuh-Uuh-Oh-Aah-Aye
Eeh) in a scale down and up while following, generally, the
chakras with hand movements. I do it because I feel better
after I do. Other magicians I know don't banish at all, while
others won't leave their house without doing an LBRP. My banishing
ritual takes a few seconds, can be done with groups, and is
a deconstruction of the GPR. I also tend to use drumming,
incense, and the strange sound of a Nepali tiger thigh flute
to set the scene and move myself into an altered, magickal
state of consciousness. I also use the LBRP, but almost never
for private ritual. In public rituals, especially before audiences
who may never have seen Ceremonial Magick before, the LBRP
has a comforting, a soothing effect. After all, it does contain
the end of the Lord's Prayer and it does call the Archangels.
I don't usually disturb such people with the fact that Demons
are sometimes classified as Angels by another name.
But if the aim of banishing
is to create a sacred space and center the magician then perhaps
this can be done just with a hand gesture, with a slight shift
in consciousness, or perhaps a declaration like Jean Luc Picard's
"Make It So"!
Modern magickal writers, to
my mind, seem terribly concerned over the sanity and well
being of new or neophyte magicians. I'm not sure if this is
motivated by fear of litigation, higher primate hierarchical
motives, or genuine concern that new magicians will actually
go crazy.
My suggestion is try it both
ways. Do rituals without banishing and do rituals with banishing.
Then do what you prefer. After all, if you get infected by
some strange denizen of the Deep Mind because you didn't bother
to banish, you could always ask one of us to exorcise it.
There's always a hearty welcome at my house for demonic entities!
I like them. I like to make them work for me, and I like to
eat them. They always have a choice, and demon heart is a
lot tastier than angel heart!
Free Belief and Vacuity
A technique explored by AO
Spare and discussed at length by Stephen Mace but strangely
absent from many other discussions of Chaos Magickal techniques
is the state of mind called Free Belief by Mace, and generally
referred to by Spare as the Neither-Neither principle.
Spare wrote:
"When the mind is nonplused capability to attempt the
impossible becomes known."
Spare's magickal approach is reductionist. He wrote:
"Magic, the reduction
of properties to simplicity, making them transmutable to utilize
them afresh by direction, without capitalization, bearing
fruit many times."
Spare believed that acts of magick were most likely to succeed
when the mind had attained a state in which duality had been
extinguished through a process in which dualistic notions
were systematically eliminated by counterpoising them against
each other. He called this the Neither-Neither principle.
Students of Yogic techniques will recognize this as the Neti-Neti
meditation, a meditation in which the seeker questions his
or her self-identity by discounting all that he or she is
not. For example:
I am not my name.
I am not my body.
I am not my genetic structure.
I am not my mind
etc., etc.
Mace gives a simple method
for applying Spare's technique:
"To apply this principle
to conjuring, wait until you are absolutely positive something
is true, then search for its opposite. When you find it, oppose
it to your 'truth" and let them annihilate one another
as well they may. Any residue you should oppose to its opposite
until your truth has been dismembered and the passion behind
it converted into undirected energy-free belief."
FireClown explains this in another way. According to his theory
on the formation of entities, obsession naturally creates
thought forms which soon achieve a form of independence and
turn into demons. Now demons, and semi-detached parts of the
magician's psyche in general, do not wish to be re-assimilated,
or destroyed. Consequently they will seek energy from any
source in the magician's psyche, but primarily from long running
maladaptive sub-programs such as resentment towards one's
parents, one's spouse, or ex-spouse, feelings of inferiority,
or whatever tape loops are recurrent in the magician's psyche.
The generation of free belief presents the magician with a
source of psychic energy, originating in obsession, that allows
the actualization of magickal intentions. Without generating
free belief the energy the magician summons is eaten by demons
and used by them for their own self-perpetuation. Consequently
the magickal act fails.
Spare wrote:
"When by the wish to
believe-it is of necessity incompatible with an existing belief
and is not realized through the inhibition of the organic
belief-the negation of the wish, faith moves no mountains,
not till it has removed itself."
Or, if wishes were horses beggars would ride. Mere wishing
is rarely sufficient if obsessional energy is at play. Simple
spells, such as those used to get a table at a crowded restaurant,
can succeed because of their simplicity, and because obsessional
energy has not created demonic entities.
The bar against success in
magick is the contradictory opinions the magician holds of
his or her capacity to succeed. Spare suggests that this very
process can be used by the magician to create a state of mind
in which magick will work. Correct use of the Neither- Neither
principle brings about the state Spare calls Vacuity, which
is, as T.S.Eliot suggests, is
"A state of complete
simplicity
Costing not less than everything."
To return to servitors, then, once the servitor has been developed,
and a banishing ritual performed, the magician must achieve
a state of vacuity, a state in which free belief exists. One
way to achieve this is the Neither-Neither. As Mace writes:
"By applying the Neither-Neither
we can gut the meaningless convictions that obsess us every
day and use the power released to cause the changes we desire."
Peter Carroll calls this state of vacuity Gnosis. He wrote
"Methods of achieving
gnosis can be divided into two types. In the inhibitory mode,
the mind is progressively silenced until only a single object
of concentration remains. In the excitatory mode, the mind
is raised to a very high pitch of excitement while concentration
on the objective is maintained. Strong stimulation eventually
elicits a reflex inhibition and paralyzes all but the most
central function-the object of concentration. Thus strong
inhibition and strong excitation end up creating the same
effect-the one-pointed consciousness, or gnosis."
The Neither-Neither technique is primarily inhibitory, although,
through the artificial manipulation of emotional states attached
to obsessive energy there is no reason why the method could
not produce an excitatory effect.
Achieving this state ensures
that the servitor can be charged. Not achieving this state
runs the risk that the care the magician has put into developing
the servitor will come to nothing because the energy developed
will end up feeding the magician's unbound and perhaps unknown
demons.
To continue with the example
of the Psycho Zippy servitor I am creating to facilitate payments
through U.P.S. and the Postal Service, I can create free belief
by choosing a recurring tape from my own psyche. I know, for
example, I still resent my father for sending me away to school
in England. I believe he did it because he was jealous of
my mother's affection for me. I can counterpoint this belief
by reminding myself that sending me to boarding school was
not only very expensive for him but that he believed he was
affording me an education that he had been denied due to the
poverty of his parents. On the other hand I truly hated the
institutionalized cruelty of English boarding school. I can
counterpoint this with the fact that when I was old enough
to enumerate the problems with the type of school to which
he had sent me he removed me at once and placed in a school
that was actually enlightened. I can continue in this way
counterpoising one belief with a contrary argument until finally
I am left with nothing to which the obsessive resentment can
attach. At this point I am ready to charge the servitor. I
have moved myself to a calm and one-pointed state of mind
that is nevertheless suffused with psychic energy.
The Actual Launch
To recapitulate: I have created a sacred space by means of
a banishing ritual. I have created the appropriate energy
to charge the servitor by using the method of Free Belief.
I am in a state of vacuity. At this point I can bring the
image of Psycho Zippy to my mind and create it as a living
form. I can visualize it racing, wraithlike, through the information
systems of UPS and the US Postal Service. I can visualize
it making the hands of postal workers touching my mail move
just a bit faster, see it increasing their concentration and
visual acuity, revving up their hand-eye-body coordination
for the apparently arduous task of getting my checks back
to me on time. I can then dispatch the servitor into the aether
with a stern admonition to do my will or suffer the consequence
of psychic dissolution.
In actual fact I did none
of these things. Instead I hosted a ritual, an invocation
of Baron Samedi, and before the invocation, but after the
banishing, had the participants gaze at my rendering of Psycho
Zippy. I then gave this rendering to a friend who was off
to a Fire Performance Art that evening, but was unable to
stay for the invocation. She had the rendering burned with
a flame-thrower while a large group of onlookers chanted "Zippy,
Zippy, Zippy."
A few days later I turned
my rendering of Zippy into labels which I have since placed
in every package I ship. Zippy has, by and large, worked very
well since then, and I would estimate that the speed of return
payments has increased by about 30 per cent.
Zippy is a servitor with a
material base, the laser printed image of him that sits on
my alter and is reproduced on my labels. Although it is by
no means necessary for servitors to have material bases, in
this case, it seemed appropriate. Phil Hine in his User's
Guide gives as examples of material bases:
"rings, bottles, crystals,
or a small metal figurine"
In a way Zippy can be termed a fetish servitor. I believe
the image I have drawn of him to have magickal power, thus
fulfilling the definition of fetish.
To give you another example
of a fetish servitor, FireClown, who was having difficulty
during job interviews, developed a bear servitor, which he
created with a material base made out of wood. It looked something
like a wood carved zuni bear. FireClown wore this amulet within
his shirt during job interviews. He visualized the bear as
a large, somewhat comical, somewhat threatening, form dancing
behind him as he sat before his interviewers. He reported
that his prospective employers became quite confused during
the interviews, ceasing to pay attention to him, and frequently
glancing behind him. His interviews were concluded rapidly
and cordially and he shortly found himself employed.
Phil Hine also suggests that
time is a factor to be considered in servitor design and creation,
and suggests that the life cycle or periodicity of a servitor
be included in its creation. I have not found this to be the
case in my own work, but then this may just be because I tend
to create servitors for perennial needs and use sigils or
godforms for ad hoc situations where I must respond rapidly
to a crisis or momentary desire.
Hine suggests a technique
that my local Chaos group -the TAZ, New Orleans node of the
Z(cluster)-has used successfully. He calls it "The Airburst
Exercise." In this technique for launching spells, including
group sigils and servitors the participants in the ritual
first develop an altered state of consciousness through whatever
means they choose - chanting, breathing, group groping...whatever.
They then visualize energy flowing to and from each other
and finally crystallizing in a sphere within their circle.
They visualize the sigil or servitor within the sphere. This
sphere is then launched into the aether (perhaps after a countdown).
The TAZ, New Orleans group,
in 1993, decided to celebrate Mardi Gras into perpetuity by
launching a chaos satellite, which they named the Zerbat.
This satellite was sent into geosynchronous orbit 30 miles
above the spire of St. Louis Cathedral shortly before Mardi
Gras of that year. The group visualized the satellite as a
chaosphere with a top hat, smoking a cigar. On Mardi Gras
Day since then members have distributed Reichian orgone collectors
throughout the French Quarter, and, at 6 pm discharged these
collectors to the Zerbat satellite through a group ritual
performed in Jackson Square. The orgones are visualized as
a stream of energy containing the revelry of Fat Tuesday in
the Vieux Carre. The Zerbat send these streams of orgiastic
energy to other satellites launched around the world by other
groups. The energy is then received by magicians using satellite
receivers (either images of such, old hubcaps, metal bowls
or, for the brave, their computers) who use the orgones for
their own magickal works. The Zerbat is, of course, a group
servitor and was launched using a variation of Hine's Airburst
Exercise.
(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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