(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)
Other Methods to Launch Servitors
Stephen Mace, in his "Stealing
the Fire from Heaven", refers to another form of servitor,
known as "The Magickal Child". This is a technique
described at length by Crowley (and forms the central theme
of his turgid work of fiction "Moonchild") in which
a couple of magicians have intercourse to produce
"an astral being whose
power is devoted to carrying out the purpose of the participants.
It is empowered by the white heat of orgasm and embodied in
the 'elixer' generated by intercourse. The participants must
give this child a name in advance and also agree on its astral
appearance, for it must fill their imaginations throughout
the rite, until climax sets it in their mingled fluids."
Mace continues with the usual
thelemic caveat:
"Any loss of concentration upon it or independent thinking
during copulation can be deadly, for then their child will
be monster. The two participants must therefore agree on the
symbolism they will use, making this formula much more relevant
to traditional magick, where common imagery is easy to come
by."
I can't help but ask what, in these days of protected sex,
one must actually do to "mingle fluids", but perhaps
we shouldn't go there. It does occur to me that this ritual
is not too far removed from normal intercourse between would
be parents anxious to conceive. Mace states that this is a
heterosexual ritual, but I can see no reason why it would
not be quite as effective, and, in the long run, probably
a great deal less stressful to society as a whole, if it were
not a same sex rite. After all, if the heterosexual couple
does not use protection and a child is the issue of the ritual,
the result might be an actual monstrous child, rather than
a servitor. Oh, the puzzles entrenched in thelemic logic!
Possibly safer for all concerned
by far is the ritual described by Mace that Austin Osman Spare
used to create servitors, which he and Mace call, creating
some confusion, "elementals".
Mace describes a technique
he asserts that Spare used called "The Earthenware Virgin."
This is a clay vessel with an opening that fits snugly around
the sorcerer's erect penis and into which he masturbates.
At the bottom of the vessel is a sigil incorporating the attributes
of the servitor. Needless to say this is a technique for male
magicians, although I am certain that inventive female magicians
could develop effective variations. On orgasm the magician
charges the sigil and then buries it, doing the whole operation
during the quarter moon (ask Mrs. Patterson why!)
Mace continues:
"When the moon passes full, the wizard digs up this clay
womb, replenishes the sperm and -'while repeating suitable
incantations'- pours it out as a libation on the ground. Then
he reburies the urn."
Sounds pretty raunchy to me, rather like a pornographic Clark
Ashton Smith story. Does the sorcerer clean the vessel before
ejaculating into it a second time, or does the grit add an
ascetic tinge to the operation?
In any event Mace states
"Spare cautions that though this technique never fails,
it is dangerous, and so he leaves much to be guessed."
Rather too much in my opinion. What if the sorcerer gets the
dimensions a little wrong? What if the sorcerer has been using
Viagra? Will he get stuck? Then what? Never mind. Back to
Mace:
"...one may suppose that
the urn acts as a clay womb in which the wizard breeds a familiar
spirit. Such help can be as risky as it is effective, however,
for if the wizard is in any way unable to control himself,
he will have an even harder time managing a semi-independent
power such as this. He must always keep the initiative over
it, never allow it any scope for independent action, and always
maintain a strict separation between its form and his own.
He must never invite it into himself."
Mace underlines "never."
This curious tendency among
magicians from all traditions to warn of the dangers of magickal
operations may be no more than stagecraft ("Kids, don't
try this at home!"), or perhaps it is more of the strange
conservatism that magicians sometimes manifest. Mace's comments
seem, from my perspective, to be quite contradictory. If the
semi-independent power is not completely autonomous how may
one maintain "a strict separation?" I'm afraid I'm
puzzled.
The Care and Feeding of Servitors
Servitors feed from the obsessional energies of the magician
that created them. In some cases, vampiric servitors, for
example, the servitor may be charged with feeding from the
energies of the individual or entity that is its target, but
even here, the magician that created it both launches it and
controls it with his or her own obsessional energies. A book-finding
servitor, for example, can rest dormant until the magician's
desire for a certain book sends it on its way.
Servitors that do not perform
according to the magician's desire need discipline. This can
consist merely of a warning. On the other hand a servitor
that consistently fails in its duties obviously needs to be
recalled. Chaos magick is, after all, results oriented magick.
Servitors can be dissipated by destroying their material base,
by visualizing their dissolution, or by any other means the
magician finds effective.
Servitors may be domiciled
on the magician's alter. I tend to return mine to a number
of crystals strewn about my alter, or to some other material
base there residing. Since servitors are semi-independent
most authors caution against allowing them to exist in an
uncontrolled form, since, at least in theory, they will continue
to subsist off the life energies of the magician, which may,
over a period of time, debilitate the sorcerer. Jaq. D. Hawkins,
in her book, "Spirits of the Earth" has the following,
fairly typical admonition about thought-form elementals (her
name for servitors):
"these artificial entities
have survival instincts. Once a thought form is created, it
will generally continue to take spiritual energy from its
creator until it is dissipated or reabsorbed, which is something
which should be kept in mind when deciding to do this in the
first place. The energy to sustain a single thought form may
go unnoticed, but sending streams of thought forms off to
do one's bidding could sap one's energy to depletion and lead
to illness. It is always prudent to have a plan in place to
reabsorb the entity, and therefore one's own energy, once
the purpose is accomplished."
Again, the validity of this
admonition has more to do with the magickal model to which
the magician subscribes rather than natural law. Certainly
magicians using the Spirit Model, the Energy Model, and even
the Psychological Model to an extent, might agree. Magicians
using the Information Model, in which the servitor is essentially
self-replicating code programming energy, might disagree,
since this Model does not require the magician to use his
or her own life force, except perhaps to launch the servitor.
Readers of this essay are advised to determine which paradigm,
or which combination of paradigms they are using in a particular
operation, and act accordingly in determining whether to reabsorb
or dissipate the servitor.
Binding Demons, Elementals,
and Other Entities
As stated above, this essay is primarily concerned with creating
semi-independent entities out of the mind of the magician.
However, it is possible to use the vast variety of independent
entities that populate the Spirit Model as servitors. As indicated
earlier, these entities tend to be less manageable for a variety
of reasons. They are products of the group consciousness of
Planet Earth, tend to be more self-willed (and consequently
require more energy to be controlled) and are often contaminated
by conflicting instructions placed upon them by prior sorcerers.
However they may be used, particularly if the magician has
a personal bond with the entity, through memory, propinquity,
or a recognition of psychological characteristics within the
magician that the entity in question also possesses. Some
of these entities, however, are really godforms, or extrusions
of such, and need to be handled in a quite different manner,
but that's a topic for another essay. I would encourage magicians
wishing to use these entities to use lesser demons, minor
elementals.
I do not intend to go into detail on the methods the magician
can use to evoke and control these entities. The annals of
magick are already full of extremely detailed instructions.
However, the question posed
earlier, whether one can use a bound demon's energy to reinforce
personality elements that the magician wants to strengthen,
should be answered.
Traditional ceremonial magicians,
of course, habitually do this, summoning, for example, a demon
of lust and charging it with the task of causing an object
of his or her amorous attentions to fall in love with the
sorcerer. In this case, from the viewpoint of the theory of
servitor dynamics outlined in this essay, the magician has
bound the demon of his own lust and converted it into a type
of glamour attractive to the object of his infatuation.
The question was asked, however,
by someone who wanted to use a personality defect as the energy
source for a personality asset. To give an example, resentment
towards one's parents, if fed frequently enough (and isn't
it usually) creates demonic energy that can crystallize into
a thought form. Can this demon can be bound and its energy
then used to charge a servitor whose function is to increase
the personality asset of, say, self-confidence? The process
this would occur would be whereby, every time the magician
feels resentment towards his or her parents, the energy from
this resentment is directed towards the servitor whose task
is to increase the magician's self-confidence. The answer
is that the energy from the resentment must be clarified,
or filtered, as it were, before it can be of use to the character
enhancing servitor. An effective method for doing this would
be the Free Belief technique outlined above. Thus the energy
would not be contaminated by the emotional charge of resentment,
but be pure psychic material, suitable for feeding a servitor.
A final word about the therapeutic
techniques of psychodynamic theory would be useful here since
the above technique would be more properly classified as the
use of servitors as a form of magickal psychotherapy.
Magick and Psychotherapy
Modern magick and psychotherapy share a number of commonalties.
Both attempt to empower the individual, both attempt to discern
the relationship of the individual to the universe, both attempt
to make that relationship as functional, in terms of the individual's
goals, as possible. Although many magicians might disagree,
magick is also an attempt by the magician to integrate disparate
elements of his or her personality into a unified whole, which
is, of course, a primary goal in psychotherapy. This is not
to say that magick is psychotherapy. Magick is clearly a quite
different field of human endeavor. Psychotherapy generally
has a sociological goal, that is the development of personality
assets that allow the individual to function within society
in an easy and comfortable manner. Magicians generally could
care less about social approval, although they might well
seek the approval of their magickal peers.
Psychodynamic approaches
to psychotherapy (also known as psychoanalysis) seek to overcome
defenses so that repressed materials can be uncovered, insight
into personal motivation can be achieved, and unresolved childhood
issues can be controlled. Psychoanalysis, probably because
of its dismal success rate and enormous expense, has now pretty
much given way to psychopharmacological interventions among
psychiatrists. However, servitor creation and deployment certainly
uses psychoanalytic techniques, to the extent that the magician
attempts to discover obsessional thought patterns, tries to
find out exactly what it is that he or she wants, and uses
the material of his or her own psychological history as part
of the material in the development of the servitor. The primary
difference is that psychoanalysis seeks to bring repressed
materials to the surface so that they can dissipate (if, in
fact they do), while chaos magicians mine their own repressions
and obsessions for energy to empower creations of their own
imaginations, a goal that many psychiatrists might regard
as being quite contrary to mental health.
Rather than looking at chaos
magick in terms of its therapeutic uses as a psychodynamic
form of therapy it may be more accurate to define it as a
modality that looks remarkably similar to that adopted by
situationalist or contextual psychologists. Situationalism,
a view of personality championed by Walter Mischel argues
that whatever consistency of behavior that is observable is
largely determined by the characteristics of the situation
rather than any internal personality types or traits. From
this somewhat radical perspective it is arguable that personality
does not actually exist, but is a construct placed by an observer
on responses that an individual has to his or her environment.
In other words, personality is contained in those behavior
patterns the observer chooses to regard. Similarities in patterns
of behavior result from similarities in the situation the
individual encounters rather than any underlying traits or
characteristics the individual might contain. This fluid conception
of personality is integral to Chaos Magic which argues that
it is not so much any internal validity (or consistency!)
of belief structures that a magician may adopt that are important,
but rather the tenacity with which the a magician can hold
a belief during the period contained by the magical rite.
Chaos magicians tend to be results oriented, more concerned,
that is, with whether a magical rite works than with its consistency
with any encompassing belief structures. Consequently the
Chaos magician is quite content with adopting radically different
personality characteristic than those with which he or she
may find comfortable outside the space and period of the magical
rite. Phil Hine, for example, cites a magician, who, wishing
to pass a test in mathematics at college adopted the personality
(to the best of his ability) of Mr. Spock from Star Trek for
three days before the exam, and then passed the test with
no problems. The magical practice of invocation, in which
the practitioner adopts the personality characteristics of
the deity or entity he or she invokes, also suggests that
possession rituals are primarily situationist in underlying
theory. The situation here is the expectation that the invoked
God, demon, or entity will act in certain ways. Jan Fries,
one of the clearest writers on magic derived from A.O.Spare,
writes of the nearly epileptic seizures of contemporary Japanese
spirit mediums
"Dramatic healings have
much to do with play acting and giving the audience the entertainment
it desires. The medium or shaman pretends the eternal 'as
if' which becomes the 'as is' in the act of doing."
To summarize, then, Chaos Magick is distinguished by its empirical
approach to magic (techniques that do not actualize the magician's
desires are discarded), by an assertion that personality is
a construct comprised of belief structures the individual
chooses to regard as containing consistent and constant elements,
and by the idea that the primary obstacle to the actualization
of a desire through a magical rite is the interference of
the conscious mind. The underlying concept here is that there
exists an unconscious, perhaps even a collective unconscious,
termed by Jan Fries "the Deep Mind" and by A.O.Spare
"Kia", but an acceptance of this idea, because of
the situationalist approach of Chaos magicians, not necessary
to the successful fulfillment of desires through magical rituals.
It is, rather, part of the argument, a method to persuade
Chaos magicians that the techniques may actually work, but
the primary function is rhetorical, not substantive. This
is, of course, a radical approach to magic, not to mention
psychology, but it can be substantiated as an effective approach
among certain individuals. To be sure, chaos magicians routinely
use chaos magickal techniques for personal psychotherapeutic
goals.
Phil Hine recognized this
in his User's Guide:
"A purely psychodynamic model of Servitor operation would
state that our psyche is made up of a very large cluster of
forces which can be projected as intelligences, complexes,
or subpersonalities (whether you're into magick, NLP, Jungian
Psychotherapy, etc). These mental forces enable us to do some
things but prevent us from doing others. By consciously realigning
and redirecting these energies we can create Servitors which
will enable us to do things which we couldn't do before, such
as refrain from compulsive behaviors, thoughts, or emotions.
In these terms, a Servitor is a conscious form of redirecting
these largely unconscious entities so that they work for us."
I believe that chaos magickal techniques would actually prove
quite valuable to psychotherapists in the treatment of abnormal
behavior, but that, I'm afraid, is a topic for an entirely
different essay.
(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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