Post by fEAlEAtArO on Oct 20, 2007 11:47:17 GMT -5
Sigils, Servitors and Godforms
By: Marik
Part Two: 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 discoveredthrough 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.
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 performance 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 willensue, 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 personalityand 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 A.O. Spare 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.
By: Marik
Part Two: 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 discoveredthrough 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.
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 performance 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 willensue, 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 personalityand 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 A.O. Spare 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.