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Sigils,
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07-21-2004, 11:37 PM |
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Sigils, Servitors, &
Godforms
Cadged from http://www.liminalspace.co.uk/edition%202.htm
Quote:
Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms By Marik
(MarkDeFrates, marik@aol.com) Sigils, servitors
and god-forms are three magickal techniques that
chaos magicians use to actualize magickal
intentions. Sigils are magickal spells developed
and activated to achieve a specific, fairly well
defined and often limited end. Servitors are
entities created by a magician and charged with
certain functions. Godforms are complex belief
structures, often held by a number of people, with
which a magician interacts in order to actualize
fairly broad magickal intentions. These three
techniques are not quite as distinct as these
definitions would suggest, they tend to blur into
one another. The purpose of this essay is to
explain these magickal tools, indicate their
ppropriateness for different types of magickal
intentions, and show how these tools relate to the
general theories of chaos magick and of Dzog Chen,
a form of Tibetan Buddhism.
Part One:
Sigils
1. A Universe neither of Man nor
God
The use of the
techniques of the chaos magician presupposes a
certain stance, or attitude, towards magick that
is relatively new in the history of the occult.
This stance may, for lack of a better word, be
described as postmodern, since it is neither
traditional nor modern. The differences between
these three approaches to magick - traditional,
modern or postmodern can be elucidated as three
conceptions of the nature of the universe. The
traditional approach is based in Judeo-Christian
metaphysics and views the universe as
anthropomorphic, in the image of the ChristianGod, or less
rarely, some other anthropomorphic form. The
traditional magician believes that the universe is
understandable by human consciousness because
human beings are made in the image of God. The
modern view is essentially a reaction to this and
humanist in the extreme. Here the universe may be
perceived as Newtonian, as a machine that is
ultimately understandable by human consciousness,
although humans may have to evolve into a more
powerful form to be able to do this. The
postmodern view of the chaoist denies that the
universe can ever be understood by the human mind.
Influenced by modern physics, particularly quantum
mechanics and chaos theory, the chaos magician
tends to accept the universe as a series of
phenomena that have little to do with human
beings. In other words traditional magick can be
said to be God centered, modern magick to be human
centered while postmodern magick eschews the very
idea of a center. A brief review of traditional
and modern approaches to ceremonial magick may
help to illuminate the postmodern stance of the
freestyle chaoist.
Ceremonial
magicians use ritual magick to create effects in
themselves or in the universe that they do not
feel they can as efficiently bring about through
normal means. All magicians agree that magick can
cause change, but few would argue that the change
is inevitable, completely predictable, or fully
knowable by the magician. All magicians, to a
greater or lesser extent, are engaged in an
ongoing dynamic in which the issues of personal
desire, personal control and personal belief are
thrust against the strictures of the universal
consensual belief structure, the concept of will
as a universal force, and the ideas of fate,
predestination, and karma. At the core of this
confrontation is the question of the nature of the
universe. The question is: is the universe human
centered, designed, created and maintained by a
god force, or is it, as modern science seems to
indicate, just there?
Until recently,
magicians have tended to distinguish amongst
themselves by hue, and the colors of the magician
(white, gray or black) refer precisely to this
dynamic, the confrontation between the personal
wishes of the magician and a universal standard of
morality or law. White, and to an extent, grey
magicians, attempt to remove themselves from the
debate by insisting that their magickal acts are
inspired only by the highest motives of service
and self-knowledge, that, indeed, they wish only
to do the will of higher powers known as their
Holy Guardian Angels. Perdition shall blast, so
they say, those who use magick for self-centered
or materialistic ends. Grey magicians may proclaim
that the use of magickal powers for materialistic
ends is valid sometimes, but rarely for selfish
reasons, and in any event, is always
problematical. Donald Michael Kraig, with the
breezy superficiality of the traditional magus, in
'Modern Magick' terms white magick the use of
magick'for the purpose of obtaining the
Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian
Angel'(1), grey magick as magick used 'for
the purpose of causing either physical or
non-physical good to yourself or to others (2) and
black magick as magick used 'for the purpose of
causing either physical or non-physical harm to
yourself or others'(3). Kraig is influenced
by Aleister Crowley and by modern Wicca, or
Gardnerian witchcraft. Wiccans, ever concerned
that their white magick might slide through some
unconscious twitch of desire through grey into
black, corrected Crowley's axiom 'Do What Thou
Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law' with
the enervating modifier 'An it Harm None'.
Kraig, worried that readers of his treatise might
fall 'into the pit of the black magician,'
encourages neophyte mages to practice only white
magick. Fortunately, before he is two thirds of
the way through his book Kraig is happily
discoursing on talismans, grimoires, and the
correct methods for disposing of recalcitrant
demons. Few magicians can resist the lure of dark
magick, despite protestations of innocence. This
is because even Wiccan influenced magicians are
not, as Wiccans are, devotees of a religion. That
is to say magicians are interested in the dynamic
of personal will versus (in Crowley's term)
True Will, while Wiccans have resolved this
issue. While the occasional conflict may remain,
Wiccans, like Christians, Jews, and Moslems
understand that they have agreed to submit their
wills to that which they construe to be the
Will of their deities. Magicians, on the
other hand, are not so sure. This, more than any
other factor, accounts for the intense suspicion
those of a religious cast view those who practise
magick.
The designation of
black magician still tends to be a term that
magicians use to vilify other magicians. Aleister
Crowley, arguably the single greatest influence on
the development of magick in this century, and,
for the purposes of this essay, defined as a
traditional magician, used the term in this way.
In 'Magick', for example, he asserted 'any will
but that to give up the self to the Beloved is
Black Magick,'(4). That is to say, any use
of magick unlike his use of magick is black
magick. Elsewhere Crowley
muttered darkly about the existence of 'Black
Lodges' and 'Black Brothers',
magicians who chose to remain in the Abyss, the
metaphysical gap between the first three sephiroth
and the remainder of the Tree of Life. A magus of
this hue, Crowley stated,
secretes 'his elements around his Ego as if
isolated from the Universe'(5), and turns
his back on the true aim of magick, which
according to Aleister, is the 'attainment of the
Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian
Angel. It is the raising of the complete man in a
vertical straight line. Any deviation from this
line tends to become black magic. Any other
operation is black magick'(6).As students
of mysticism will recognize, this goal is
identical with the mystic's goal of the union of
the self with God. Crowley, of
course, wrote with his feet firmly planted in the
Judeo-Christian paradigm, a paradigm in which the
universe is visualized as AdamKadmon, the
Great Man, and is thus wholly anthropomorphized.
In 1969, Anton LaVey posited the
argument of the modern black magician when in'The
Satanic Bible' he asserted 'No one on earth ever
pursued occult studies, metaphysics, yoga, or any
other 'white light' concept without ego
gratification or personal power as a goal '(7).
Moreover, LaVey claimed 'There is no difference
between 'White' and 'Black' magic except in the
smug hypocrisy, guilt ridden righteousness, and
self-deceit of the 'White' magician
himself'( . Thus the term black magician began to
be associated with a style of magick that did not
distinguish between self-interest and
self-knowledge. LaVey in his organization, The
Church of Satan, and later MichaelAquino in his
schismatic order, The Temple of Set, argued that
the will of the individual magician was paramount.
Both denied even the existence of a universal
Will. LaVey stated 'The Satanist realizes
that man, and the action and reaction of the
universe, is responsible for everything and
doesn't mislead himself into thinking that someone
cares.' (9) MichaelAquino asserted
'The Black Magician, on the other hand, rejects
both the desirability of union with the Universe
and any self-deceptive tactics designed to create
such an illusion'(10). Unfortunately the
refusal of modern black magicians to deal with the
possibility that man may not be at the center of
the universe, or may just be one in a large series
of interdependent phenomena leads to an error.
Reluctant, it seems, even to adopt completely a
materialistic or mechanistic view of the universe,
LaVey and Aquino embrace
the ghost in the machine and assert that the
individual ego can continue after death. Thus
LaVey stated 'If a person has been vital
throughout his life and has fought to the end for
his earthly existence, it is this ego which will
refuse to die, even after the expiration of the
flesh that housed it'(11). There is, of
course, not a shred of evidence to prove that this
has ever happened nor that it can happen, but
magicians of all hues, together with the adherents
of most of the world's religions, continue to
assert blandly the existence of a transpersonal,
individuated spark that somehow is exempt from the
normal process of birth, life, death, and
corruption, a kind of eternal homunculus.
Apparently the notion that the universe may not
actually be human centered is too frightening for
Satanists and modern black magicians to bear, and
the old chestnut of the soul is dredged out of the
Judeo-Christian quagmire, brushed off, and
presented as the 'fully gratified' ego of
the modern immortal Satanist.
Teetering on the edge of postmodern
magick, PeterCarroll, the
first contemporary popularizer of chaos magick, in
'Liber Null and Psychonaut', accepted the idea
that the universal force may not be a force that
bears much relationship to humanity. He
stated:'The force which initiates and moves
the universe, and the force which lies at the
center of consciousness, is whimsical and
arbitrary, creating and destroying for no purpose
beyond amusing Itself. There is nothing spiritual
or moralistic about Chaos and Kia. We live in a
universe where nothing is true...'(12).
Carroll was aware of the true nature of the
ego, and stated 'developing an ego is like
building a castle against reality'(13).
Moreover, he recognized that 'the real Holy
Guardian Angel is just the force of consciousness,
magic, and genius itself, nothing more. This
cannot manifest in a vacuum: it is always
expressed in some form, but its expressions are
not the thing itself.'(14) In this
statement Carroll aligned
himself with the quantum mechanical view of the
universe, a view that refuses to discriminate
phenomena on the basis of dualistic concepts, but
stresses the wave like nature of energy. This is
also the viewpoint of sophisticated Buddhism. The
key phrase of the "PrajnaParamita", a
critical sutra in the development of Buddhist
metaphysics, states 'form is only emptiness and
emptiness is only
form.'
Ultimately Carroll,
however, was as reluctant as a Satanist to let go
of the comforting paradigm of the soul or spirit
and despite paying lip service to a universe in
quantum flux stated 'The adept magician however
will have so strengthened his spirit by magick
that it is possible to carry it over whole into a
new body'(15). This turns out to be a
crippling flaw in Carroll's
approach to magick and one that reinforces his
belief in the efficacy of hierarchical magick, a
contradiction of the fundamental principle of
chaos magick, that it replicates the non-ordered
flow of phenomena in the universe. The ego, after
all, is an ordered construct that tolerates
nothing so little as the inevitability of change.
Perhaps the problem lay in Carroll's
assertion that 'physical processes alone will
never completely explain the existence of the
universe'(16), a statement that eventuates
from the dualistic, epistemological mindset of
Newtonian physics and Aristotelian western
philosophy. Perhaps it comes from a fear of death.
Yet concurrent with this
discriminatory, black/white, dualistic approach of
western occultism, there has always been another
strain, the shamanistic, orgiastic approach that
deliberately blurrs these definitions and seeks to
confront the universe as a dynamic, and non human
process. This approach, however, has usually been
the domain of art and artists rather than
occultists. Modern English poetry since
MatthewArnold's
'DoverBeach' has been
obsessed with reconciling the poetic imagination
with a stark and inhuman universe. Arnold
recognized the universe in 1867 as a place
that:
Hath really neither
joy, nor love, nor
light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for
pain And we are
here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night
By the time T.S.
Eliot wrote 'The Wasteland' in 1922, he saw
the universe as 'a heap of broken mirrors',
an metaphor that aptly describes the shattering of
the familiar concept of the universe as reflecting
a human face. The year before, W.B.Yeats in 'The
Second Coming'
concurred:
Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold;. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere The
ceremony of innocence is
drowned;
But the fullest
expression of the awareness that the movement of
energy through the universe is absolute,
interpenetrating, and neither particularly humane
nor human comes in 1934 with DylanThomas and:
The force that through the green
fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the
roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is
bent by the same wintry
fever.
This dawning
consciousness infuses all the arts, from the
movement of modern art, from Dada and Cubism,
through Abstract Expressionism, to modern music,
from the dissonance of Ravel's 'La Valse'
to JohnCage to
minimalism to industrial. Artists for one hundred
and fifty years have struggled to depict the face
of a chaotic universe, and man's far from central
place within it. In fact, the occult has been one
of the last areas of human intellectual endeavour
to avail itself of this perception of the
universe. Not until the development of chaos
magick can it truly be said that magick has
finally started to deal with the insights of
modern art and modern science.
Chaos magick derives from a series of
magical positions articulated by AustinOsmanSpare, a
contemporary of Aleister Crowley. Spare's vision,
itself influenced by the work of WilliamBlake, is
contained succinctly in 'The Book of Pleasure'.
Spare's approach to magick and the universe has
been validated by the discoveries of the new
physics, by quantum science, and by chaos
mathematics. The metaphysical basis for Spare's
magick is similar to that of DzogChen, a form of
Tibetan Buddhism, and, in fact, the reference and
counter reference between Buddhism, art, science,
and chaos magick is striking and continuous. Spare
wrote 'The Book of Pleasure' between 1909 and
1913, but most of Spare's work was ignored until
Carroll began writing about it. There are a
number of reasons for this. Spare's work was
printed in small runs and he did not seek fame.
His style is elliptical and obscure. His work is
difficult to understand in the absence of his lush
illustrations, and since the illustrations are
spells, or more precisely, sigils, they affect a
deep level of the mind and tend to distract one
from the content of his writing. His style is
declaratory, arrogant, and uses a special
vocabulary, the definitions for which have to be
teased out of the text. But perhaps of most
importance, Spare's view of the universe is
non-human, and consequently the usual god centered
or human centered context of magick is absent. Not
until contemporary metaphysical thought had
changed to allow a non anthropomorphic universe
did Spare become accessible. Even now he, together
with KennethGrant, is one
of the least read and least understood among
modern magickal writers.
Spare begins with the idea of Kia, of
which he says, in an echo of the Tao Te Ching,
'The Kia that can be expressed by conceivable
ideas is not the eternal Kia, which burns up all
belief.'(17) Thus he does not designate by
name that which later chaos magicians would call
Chaos, but concentrates on the immediate
manifestation of the formless which he describes
as 'the idea of self'. This is precisely
the viewpoint of DzogChen.
DzogChen, a
sorcerous form of Buddhism developed by
Padmasambhava in the eighth century a.c.e., posits
the creation of the manifest universe as occurring
at the instant that the conception of self
develops. Spare said of Kia 'Anterior to Heaven
and Earth, in its aspect that transcends these,
but not intelligence, it may be regarded as the
primordial sexual principle, the idea of pleasure
in self-love.'(1 In DzogChen the
initial impulse splits emptiness from form,
nirvana from samsara and develops dualistic
thinking. The multiplicity of the universe streams
out of this split.
One of the central
symbols of DzogChen is the
dorje. A form of magick wand, the dorje is
composed of two stylized phalluses joined by a
small central ball. The dorje is, according to
DzogChen, a
'terma', or hidden teaching. This teaching
is a treasure hidden by Padmasambhava. The whole
of the dorje refers to the unlimited potentiality
of the universe, and thus, in modern terms, is an
image of chaos, or the quantum flux of the
universe that is before and beyond discriminatory
thinking, inseparable, indissoluble. The two ends
of the dorje refer, respectively, to form and
emptiness, or samsara and sunyata. The small
central bead that joins the two ends of this
bilaterally symmetrical object is hollow to show
the unknowable potentiality at the intersection
between form and emptiness, and also to refer back
to the chaos current. Thus the dorje is a three
dimensional symbol for the way the universe
manifests itself from unity through duality into
its full, lush complexity. As Spare says 'As unity
conceived duality, it begot trinity, begot
tetragrammaton.'(19) In a statement that
presages the modern understanding of the fractal
universe as an event that is essentially a complex
repetition and multiplication of a series of
simple forms, Spare
wrote:
The dual principle is the
quintessence of all experience, no ram-ification
has enlarged its early simplicity, but is only its
repetition, modification or complexity, never is
its evolution complete. It cannot go further than
the experience of self-so returns and unites again
and again, ever an anti-climax. For ever
retrogressing to its original simplicity by
infinite complication is its evolution. No man
shall understand 'Why' by its workings. Know it as
the illusion that embraces the learning of all
existence.(19)
Recognizing the
recursive movement of the movement of energy, or
consciousness, through the universe, that is to
say, of Kia, is essential to the understanding of
the form of magick that Spare developed because it
indicates the structure of the spells, sigils, and
magickal techniques of chaos magick. Refuting
absolutely the notion that this flow of energy is
ever understandable by dualistic minds, Spare
stated unequivocally that the magickal energy of
the universe, the force that interpenetrates all
phenomena is non-human. Moreover Spare required
the magician, in order to avail himself of this
force, to renounce his human belief systems, his
dualistic mind, to achieve a state of
consciousness that, as much as possible, mimicked
the primordial. How to do this is the subject of
the next section of this essay.
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__________________ When patterns are
broken, new worlds emerge. -Tuli
Kupferberg
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07-21-2004, 11:40 PM |
#2 |
Moderator Simplissimus™
Mmothra is
Offline:
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Location: San Francisco, CA
Posts: 729 |
Part Two of the essay
Quote:
2. Spare,
Self-Love and Sigil
Magick Spare recognized that the greatest
bar to the successful actualization of the
magickal intention was self-consciousness, the
normal, dualistic state of mind that carries the
baggage of our cultural context, our upbringing,
our human or god centered belief system.
Throughout 'The Book of Pleasure' he inveighed
against the idea of God. He stated 'The idea of
God is the primordial sin, all religions are
evil'(20) He warned of the toxic effects of
self-judgment, of self-analysis while in the
performance of the magickal act. He wrote 'He who
trusts to his natural fund of genius, has no
knowledge of its extent and accomplishes with
ease, but directly he doubts, ignorance obsesses
him.'(21)
Spare asserted that
the primordial consciousness, or Kia, was
indistinguishable from the sexual impulse. This is
partly because of the dynamics of the
manifestation of the universe from chaos. From
chaos comes Kia, which immediately becomes
duality. Duality, according to Spare, forms a
trinity. This is essentially a procreative act,
which Spare rightly identified as sexual. Moreover
Spare associated the intense experience of sexual
orgasm with the experience of Kia. He
wrote:
Self-love only is the eternal all
pleasing, by meditation on this effulgent self
which is mystic joyousness. At that time of bliss,
he is punctual to his imagination, in that day
what happiness is his! A lusty innocent, beyond
sin, without hurt!(22)
Access to magickal
power, according to Spare, is encouraged by the
state of consciousness we enter when in orgasm,
while the activation of spells is facilitated by
the sensation of 'vacuity'. This, he wrote
'is obtained by exhausting the mind and body by
some means or another.'(21) Sexual release
was a frequent path to this for Spare, and a
common motif in his drawings is a hand with
fingers curled and thumb outstretched, an image of
both painting and masturbation. Variants of this
image include a hand with eyes, a hand with face,
and a hand with wings. Spare continuously sought
the integration of magickal concept with magickal
gesture (mudra), with magickal drawing, with
magickal act.
Spare believed that
it was essential to base magickal acts in a state
of consciousness he terms
'Neither-Neither', a state of simplicity
and pure self. This is a state where, however
briefly, the mind has ceased its chattering, its
continual discourse, and is in a state that can
most easily be achieved by exhaustion, but may
also be a result of sex, alcohol, or today, even
watching television until the mind has become numb
and mute.The state of vacuity can also be reached
by the 'neti neti' technique of yoga, a
technique in which emotional states and mental
concepts are annihilated by being opposed against
each other. Doubtless Spare was aware of this
technique when he devised the Neither-Neither
formulation of vacuity. This technique results in
so called 'free energy', psychic energy
that can be used to charge a sigil or infuse a
magickal act. Spare wrote that magick was 'the
reduction of properties to simplicity.'(22)
Moreover, he believed that the conscious mind
prevented the fulfillment of the magickal
intention. He wrote that conscious desire raises
self-doubt and 'lust for result', that it
was 'non-attractive', creating
'anxiety' which 'defeats the
purpose' because 'it retains and exposes
the desire'(23).
Spare asserted that
the ground for magickal action was the
'sub-consciousness', what we would normally
call today the subconscious or the unconscious
mind. He argued that the place where the magickal
spell could be seeded was deep within the mind of
the magician. He defined the subconsciousness as
'the epitome of all experience and wisdom, past
incarnations as men, animals, birds, vegetable
life, etc., etc., everything that exists, has and
ever will exist.'(24) Spare believed that
it was possible to reach this 'storehouse of
memory' through sigils and other magickal
acts, but he consistently cautioned against using
the rational or discriminative mind to reach the
sub-consciousness. He wrote 'in striving for
knowledge we repel it, the mind works best on a
simple diet.' This stress on simplicity,
efficiency and non-rational technique is a major
characteristic differentiating Spare from most
other magicians of the Twentieth Century. Spare
wrote 'By Sigils and the acquirement of vacuity,
any past incarnation, experience, etc., can be
summoned to consciousness.' (25) He placed
himself firmly against the elaborate rituals,
dogma, and unending learning of the tradition of
ceremonial magick by stating 'Know all ritual,
ceremony, conditions, as arbitrary (you have
yourself to please), a hindrance and confusion;
their origin was for amusement, later for the
purpose of deceiving others from knowing the truth
and inducing ignorance'(26)
Spare developed a method of
sigilising quite unique in the history of magick.
He maintained that 'Belief is the fall from the
Absolute'(27). In other words, belief as
usually practised, was self-defeating because 'we
are not free to believe...however much we so
desire, having conflicting ideas from first
exhaust.'(2 The mind, conditioned by its cultural
context, the universal consensual belief
structure, voices from childhood, and many
environmental factors, cannot allow pure belief,
but always muddies the intention of the magician.
Spare's genius was to develop a technique that
took this into account and subverted the
discursive mind. He said 'sigils are the art of
believing; my invention for making belief organic,
ergo, true belief.'(29) He maintained that
'belief, to be true, must be organic and
sub-conscious,' that in order for the
magickal desire to be effective, it must become
organic, and 'can only become organic at a time of
vacuity, and by giving it (Sigil)
form.'(30)
Spare stressed not
only that the sigil must be implanted in the
sub-consciousness at the moment of vacuity, but
that afterwards the magician must strive to forget
the sigil and the desire from which the sigil was
crafted. He wrote
When conscious of
the Sigil form (any time but the Magical) it
should be repressed, a deliberate striving to
forget it, by this it is active and dominates at
the unconscious period, its form nourishes and
allows it to become attached to the
sub-consciousness and become organic, that
accomplished, is its reality and
realization.(31)
The assertion that
Sigils need to be forgotten after they have been
charged means that sigils are not appropriate for
certain magickal intentions. For example, a sigil
to accomplish a goal which is long term and daily
obsession may not work if the magician is unable
to release the obsession into the magickal act.
That is to say, if the magician develops a sigil
to gain a promotion at work, to get good grades at
school, or to attract a sexual partner, if the day
after charging of the sigil the magician continues
to obsess about his lousy job, his worsening
grades or his complete inability to get laid, it
is unlikely that the sigil will work. To give a
personal example, it is my wish to actualize a
much more powerful computer system. I have
sigilized this intention. Unfortunately, every
time a computer catalog comes in the mail (almost
daily), I see the computer system I want and I
wonder when my sigil will work. I wonder if it is
going to work. I chastise myself because I am
thinking about it working. My mind then proceeds
to create all manner of confliucting thoughts
circling around this topic. Does magick really
work? Do I deserve a better computer system? Was
my father right when he thought I would be a
failure? Perhaps if I just mentally shove at the
obstacle preventing the actualizing of the sigil
it will work. Perhaps I should do the sigil again?
Perhaps I should charge it harder? Clearly, this
is 'lust for result', not to mention fear
of success and the multiple dysfunctions of
personal psychology. In this event, another
magickal technique, such as the creation of a
servitor or a sacrifice to a godform may be more
appropriate. Sigilizing is unlikely to work while
I am obsessed with a new computer
system.
The technique for
developing sigils that Spare outlines in 'The Book
of Pleasure' is simplicity itself. Giving as his
magickal intention 'This my wish to obtain the
strength of a tiger', Spare analyses the
structure of the letters of the phrases that make
up the sentence containing the magickal intention,
removes repeating letters, then combines them, and
finally simplifies them into an iconic symbol.
This symbol will be sufficiently remote from the
original sentence that it cannot be identified.
Thus the only meaning it contains resides in the
memory of the magician. Spare wrote :'Now
by virtue of this Sigil you are able to send your
desire into the subconsciousness (which contains
all strength)'.(32) Carroll
suggested two other methods for developing sigils.
In one, a picture of the magickal intention is
drawn, in another, the sentence containing the
magickal intention is transformed into a mantra
by, for example, removing repeating letters and
transposing other letters until a euphonious
phrase results. Carroll stated
'It is not necessary to use complex symbol
systems.'(33) Spare went further and wrote
'you do not have to dress up as a traditional
magician, wizard or priest, build expensive
temples, obtain virgin parchment, black goats
blood, etc., etc., in fact no theatricals or
humbug.'(34) Readers interested in these
methods for constructing sigils are directed to
Frater U.D.'s comprehensive treatise 'Practical
Sigil Magick'. As Frater U.D. indicates In Spare's
system there are no 'correct' or 'incorrect'
sigils; neither is there a list of ready-made
symbols. It is of no import whether a sigil is the
'correct' one or not, but it is crucial that it
has been created by the magician and is therefore
meaningful to him/her.'(35)
Spare's system of creating sigils is,
as Frater U.D. points out, an individual-anarchist
approach to magick. It does not require learning
complex systems, strange incantations, or any of
the usual bric-a-brac of traditional magick or
religion. It is simple and efficient. However,
anarchical as Spare was, he was also a man of his
culture and time and his system is influenced by
ideas that while far from accepted in his day,
were current. The idea of the subconscious is
clearly influenced by psychoanalytic theory,
particularly Jung, and
Spare's insistence on the primacy of the sexual
impulse owes not a little to Freud. Of
course Spare's system works if one believes in
psychoanalysis or not, not so much because the
existence of a deep unconscious, collective or
otherwise, is any more provable than the existence
of a soul, but because it subverts the conscious
mind and the failure tapes of normal
consciousness. Culturally defined consensual
belief structures work tirelessly against the
actualization of magickal intentions, requiring,
at the least, refuge in plausible explanations for
apparently abnormal events or at least some kind
of explanation. Thus unusual events such as the
actualization of a spell for success in one's job,
for example, are justified by the collective
consciousness as something that was bound to
happen anyway, or less plausibly, the inevitable
result of increased self-confidence that the
magick spell brought about in the magician. If
these explanations are insufficient then perhaps
the grace of God, angelic intervention, demonic
agency, or just good luck can be proffered. It is
the stance of modern chaos magick, however, that
none of these explanations are necessary, except
perhaps in that they increase the ability of the
magician to engineer belief structures. But the
engineering of belief structures is a poor
substitute for their suspension. If quantum
mechanics is correct, human beings live in a
universe of mind numbing complexity, at an order
of magnitude far greater than the ability of the
human mind to comprehend. If this is the case, and
we live in a quantum flux of unlimited
potentiality then all things are equally possible,
all beliefs equally true, or, as Hassan Ibn Al
Sabah, Le Vieux de Montagne, is alleged to have
said, 'Nothing is True, Everything is
Permitted.' If this is the case the need of
human psychology to explain events is merely
another aspect of the totalitarian dictates of
society's consensual belief
structures.
The vacuity that
characterizes the charging of a sigil in Spare's
system takes on a different color when viewed in
the light of modern chaos magick. It is the
No-Mind of unlimited potential, a relaxation into
the quantum flux, a suspension of both belief and
disbelief, of all the paraphernalia of the
rational, discursive mind, and of the seething,
bubbling unconscious mind or, as Buddhists would
say, 'Not Two, Not One.' From this
viewpoint, it is the discursive mind that is
delusionary, the rational mind that presents
phantasms of being and becoming. The truth is that
there is no Absolute, no becoming, no being, or as
the 'PrajnaParamita'
states:
Dharmas here are
empty all are the primal
void. None are
born or die. Nor
are they stained or pure Nor do they wax or
wane.(36)
The "PrajnaParamita", or
Heart Sutra, is at the basis of the reformulation
of Buddhism by Nagarjuna in the third century
a.c.e. Nagarjuna founded the Madhyamika
school of Buddhism, of
which DzogChen is an
offshoot. IngridFischer-Schrieber wrote of
Nagarjuna:
Nagarjuna attempts
to show the emptiness of the world through the
relativity of opposites. Opposites are mutually
dependent; one member of a pair of opposites can
only arise through the other. From this he draws
the conclusion that such entities cannot really
exist, since the existence of one pre-supposes the
existence of the
other.(37)
The reader is
cautioned that emptiness, or sunyata, in Buddhist
terminology means limitlessness, or unlimited
potentiality, which Madhyamika Buddhism asserts is
the true ground of
being.
Spare's technique
of Neither-Neither is kin to Nagarjuna's mutual
dependency of opposites. StephenMace, in his
brilliant analysis of Spare and Sorcery, 'Stealing
the Fire from Heaven', described this
technique:
The Neither-Neither
principle asserts that there is no truth anywhere
that is not balanced by an equally true opposite
somewhere, and there is only perspective and
circumstance to determine which seems more true at
any given time. 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 as they
may.Any residue should oppose to its opposite, and
so on until your truth has been dismembered and
the passion converted into undirected energy -
free belief. 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. (3
It is this
'undirected energy-free belief' that is
used to charge the sigil. For in this state of
mind the magician brings the sigil to
consciousness, concentrates on it, and allows it
to sink past consciousness into the pool of
undirected energy. In Buddhism this state is
called sunyata, or
emptiness.
In my personal
experiences of sunyata, it is a state of
consciousness characterized not so much by
silence, but by a great calm. The mind, for me at
least, continues to chatter, but it is now
recognizable as just another function of the body.
The mind chatters just as the lungs breathe, just
as the heart pumps. Thoughts arise and fall, but
the universe hums with energy, with limitless
potentiality. Space seems to expand and my vision
becomes extremely clear. Fairly rapidly, of
course, I become distracted by the novelty of the
experience and fall back into normal
consciousness, or samsara.
So Spare's technique is one designed
to reveal this state of mind, the one Buddhists
term sunyata or emptiness and Mace's 'undirected
energy' may be thought of as synonymous
with sunyata. It is part of the annihilistic
tendency in chaos magick that even Spare's
Neither-Neither technique can be considered an
unneeded elaboration, for if this state of mind is
the actual ground of being, then all that is
needed is for the magician to look in another
direction, an instant of work. Thus, the whole
edifice of ritual is viewed by chaos magicians as
a kind of massage for the mind,a way to lull it
into a state of Neither-Neither. But actually,
none of it is necessary, and perfectly valid
results can be obtained just by creating a sigil
and leaving it uncharged. Some chaos magicians
assert that sigils never need to be charged, that,
in fact, the act of their creation slips the sigil
behind the discursive rational mind.
There are other methods for creating
sigils, also, and some of these collapse the
charging into the creation. For example I once did
a sigil in a group workshop to produce a laser
printer of a certain configuration, one that was
unavailable at the time of the creation of the
sigil. My sigil, which was a paper sculpture
composed of white paper that I had colored, rolled
into a tube, cut, and shredded open, looked
nothing like my magickal intention, and, as far as
I could see had no initial reference to it either.
When I finished it I threw it under the couch of a
friend. I guessed that the couch would not be
moved for some time, and that when it was the
paper would not be recognized and would be thrown
away. The act of creating the sigil charged it for
I thought in a non-attached way, of the printer I
wanted while I created the sculpture. I recall
that we did charge the sigil by holding our breath
until near to fainting while staring at the sigil
we had created. This gave me a headache. Perhaps
when my friend moved, as he did at around the time
the printer I wanted manifested itself, he charged
it when he threw it away. Either way, the sigil
worked, and I do not trouble myself with
explaining to myself why it worked.
Jan Fries, in 'Visual Magick', has a
few other suggestions for the creation of sigils.
After discussing the traditional forms of pen,
ink, and parchment, or wood engraving, or
metalsmithing, Fries
states:
If you desire
matters of dream magick you could draw your sigil
on paper, fold it into a paper boat, and send it
off on a river, stream, or pond. The water
destroys the body and receives the idea. You might
draw the sigil in earth colours on your skin and
dance until you've sweated it off, or form the
shape in berries, food for the birds. You could
draw it in the earth with a stick and leave it for
the rains, or give it, drawn on paper, to the
fire. You might even feed on it. Ink can be washed
off and drunk with water (use a non-toxic sort),
and some signs can be drawn or baked into cakes or
bread. (39)
Chaos magicians on
the Internet have developed other techniques.
After transforming the sigil into a mantra it is
sent to a usenet newsgroup picked at random as a
garbage post (or perhaps not so random, e.g.
alt.jesus.is.lord). One innovative method
discussed on alt.magick.chaos involved developing
a database of the numbers of frequently used
public phones around the country. Chaos magicians
wishing to charge a sigil would choose a number,
dial it, and, if the phone is picked up, shout the
sigil at the baffled recipient.
By now it should be clear that the
technique of sigilising is not as important as the
creation of the mental state which accompanies it,
for it is in this ground state that magick works.
The Temple of Psychic
Youth, founded fifteen
years ago by Genesis P-Orridge and highly
influenced by the sigil techniques of A.O.Spare is
an international association of chaos magicians.
Genesis has since disavowed the project, but other
members continue the association. Historically
members of the Temple of
Psychic Youth would create sigils with three
different bodily fluids and two different protions
of hair and then send them to a central depository
of sigils at one of the headquarters of the
organization. Despite the respect with which these
sigils were regarded by TOPY members, it was
widely recognized that the act was magickal
because of the states of consciousness developed,
the interplay that these states allowed between
the conscious mind and the deep mind (or that part
of the mind that is not conscious), and that
actually, the sigils could have been incinerated
in a fire or confiscated by law enforcement
authorities without harm being done to the
magickal intention. Indeed, rumors abound to this
day,perhaps deliberately spread by TOPY members,
that the sigil depository has been compromised by
some such action. The usefulness of rumors such as
these lies in its ability to allow the ego of the
chaos magician to confront the process of magick.
Should a TOPY member be concerned that a British
bobby has his sigil, or that it was burnt, or that
some nefarious black magician is now using it in
dark magick? Certainly, if these concerns allow
the TOPY member to ask hirself what magick really
is. Genesis said, in an interview in 'Gnosis'
magazine, about this
issue:
"I wanted to contradict the
tradition that those things were innately
dangerous for other people to have possession
of.Because I thought that was something people had
hypnotized themselves into being vulnerable to."
(40)
P-Orridge's approach to chaos magick
is typical in its insistence on the importance of
belief structures and the general faith in access
to a fundamental stream of energy and power that
cannot really be termed human. He
said:
"Things do get manifested when you
focus on them and truly esire and need them to
manifest. That happens. And I don't really care
why. My suspicion is that it's an innate gift that
comes from so far ago and is so primal that it's
pointless putting names on it and trying to
humanize it. I think it is always an error to
humanize phenomena."
(41)
For magick is not a variant of the
role playing game of Dungeons and Dragons , nor is
it the Satanic cultism of the tabloid, although it
may appear from a social perspective look like
that way. Magick is the dynamic synergy of the
magician's desires with the quantum flow of the
energy matrices of the
universe.
Fries discusses in
some detail the process of spell-making , and the
common delusionary knots with which magicians
engaged in this confrontation bind themselves.
Most of these result from the mechanism Spare
termed 'lust for result', and are solved
through deliberately forgetting the sigil, the
magickal intention, and, ultimately, the
precipitating desire.
As Fries
states:
"Sigils are used
where conscious will finds its aim frustrated. We
use sigils to bypass adverse conditions, to avoid
the censorship of identity, to achieve our will
through avenues we do not even know about. If you
think about results while transmitting, you
effectively bind your mind to find a solution
along the desired channels, and this is frequently
a hindrance, as the desired channels' are usually
the very approach that does not function. Our
conscious selves are often the greatest obstacle
to the sigil's
manifestation."(42)
Unfortunately, as
Fries points out, many magicians seem to miss the
point, and, influenced by the power stratagems of
traditional magick, charge and recharge their
sigils,doubtless berating themselves for their
magickal flaccidity as they do so. In this way,
they assume, the sheer force of their conscious
will shall drive the sigil into the deep ground of
being and hence to fruition. In fact their actions
raise ever stronger barriers against this
occurring, as the conscious mind, whose habit it
is to deny the unity of the universe and the
interdependence of all phenomena, builds walls of
steel against itself. Fries counsels patience and
compassion. He suggests dealing with the non
conscious mind as one would deal with an old,
wise, dear friend. He
suggests:
Magick can be
worked quite easily once one learns to re-believe
in innocence, simplicity and direct inspiration.
Why use a memorized invocation, including 'divine
names' and 'words of power' when one can get
better and livelier results by 'speaking from the
heart' plus a dose of freestyle chaos language and
chanting? (43)
Why indeed? Partly
the answer lies in the personality and
conditioning of the magician, partly in the depth
of his experience of magick. Magicians with very
strong traditional belief structures, magicians
conditioned by membership in a magickal order such
as the Ordo Templi Orientis, or even the
Illuminates of Thanateros, may need elaborate
ritual in order to break down this conditioning
until a state of simplicity can be reached.
agicians who are relatively new to magick may need
ritual in order to increase self confidence and
decrease the effect of the anti-magickal
consensual belief structures. Magicians, young or
old, who have for some reason opened the door to
their own simplicity can successfully cast a spell
with a brief hand movement, with a howl at the
moon, or with, as I do from time to time, curse
with the crushing of a fortune cookie at a Chinese
Restaurant. No chaos magician writing today
suggests discarding Spare's techniques. The hold
of traditional magick is far too strong to neglect
such an efficient system for deprogramming. But at
least among the community of chaos magicians
discussing sigils on the Internet, suggestions are
routinely made that magick is far simpler than
even sigilising.
According to the
visions of many mystics the world itself is
suffused with magick. GeraldManleyHopkins wrote
in 1918:
The world is
charged with the grandeur of
God It will flame
out, like shining from shook
foil; It gathers
to a greatness, like the ooze of
oil Crushed....
from 'God's
Grandeur'
Although
Hopkins writes within the paradigm of
Christian mysticism, his insight of a world filled
with supernal power is hardly different from the
approach of a modern chaos magician, or a
DzogChen master. In
the middle of the 17th Century Thomas Traherne
wrote , describing the way in which he saw the
world when he was a
child:
Rich diamond and
pearl and gold In every place was
seen; are
splendors, yellow, blue, red, white and
green, Mine eyes
did everywhere behold. From
'Wonder'
The experience of
the universe as a place filled with unlimited
potentiality, and gorgeous beyond description to
boot, is typical of many altered states of
mystical perception. DzogChen maintains
that this is the actual nature of the universe, a
place of limitless light and potentiality. Tibetan
Buddhism is called the Vajrayana after this
assertion, for Vajra means diamond, and the
universe is a diamond web of dynamic
interconnections. Diamonds, in tantric tradition,
are the crystallized sperm of the gods.
The task of the magician who accepts
the mystic's description of the universe, or if
not that of the mystic, the model of the universe
proposed by quantum mechanics, for there is little
to differentiate either model from one another, is
to deprogram himself, to annihilate the
discriminatory mind sets of rational thinking, the
primary intellectual artefact of civilization. For
once this level of consciousness is reached, once
the conscious and the non conscious mind are
working together, then there is no difference
between the will of the magician and the movement
of the stream of energy that is the
universe.
JohnCage's
statement about art is as applicable to magick. He
wrote:
The history of art is simply a
history of getting rid of the ugly by entering
into it and using it. After all, the notion of
something outside of us being ugly is not outside
of us but inside of us. And that's why I keep
reiterating that we're working with our minds.
What we're trying to do is to get them open so we
don't see things as being ugly or beautiful but we
see them just as they are.
(44)
Substitute art with magick, ugly
with unattainable and beautiful with attainable,
and Cage's statement presents the formula for
chaos magick. Sigils are just one means to bring
about this transformation, to internalize a desire
that the magician considers to be unachievable so
that the discriminatory definitions of achievable
and out of reach no longer have any
validity.
Yet if there is so
little difference between the mystic and the
magician why are they traditionally viewed as two
separate paths? Few magicians would term
themselves mystics (fearing relegation to the New
Age) and even fewer mystics would term themselves
magicians. Sai Baba and a few other Indian gurus
are exceptions. In 'Liber Kaos', Peter Carroll
postulated a psychohistorical theory that asserted
that magickal shamanism, a simple and fluid form
of magick based upon a mystical awareness of the
interdependence of all phenomena, degrades into
paganism, and with the growth of religious forms
magick is relegated to a priestly caste, who, over
a period of time lose access to the magickal
current and degrade into formalism. (45) The
argument is plausible, particularly when placed
alongside the rise of civilization, an event that
required the development of hierarchical society.
Social hierarchy, of course, is a template that is
internalized at an early age, and defines access
to power as being confined to channels devised by
other than oneself. This notion is anathema to
magick in general, and chaos magick in particular.
Thus in tribal societies there would appear to be
little difference between the mystic and the
magician, both roles often being held in the
personage of the tribal shaman, and all members of
the tribe, in some degree or another, having
access to the universal magickal power. By the
time one thousand years of Christian conditioning
had afflicted the minds of the peoples of the
West, magickal acts were either heretical, quaint
and secretive folk practices, or, if approved by
the Church, miraculous and the marks of sainthood.
Another thousand years of the slow deterioration
of this conditioning, and, finally, the beginnings
of breakdown in the toxic structures of
civilization, and magick has begun to be seen as a
power available to all, as a means of directly
communicating with the universe as it is, and as a
particularly appropriate series of techniques to
live in a universe in which human beings are both
as incidental and as important as all other
phenomena.
Footnotes
1. DonaldMichaelKraig: Modern
Magick, Llewellyn,
St. Paul, Minnesota, 1992, p. 10 2.
Kraig, p. 11 3. Kraig, p. 12 4. Aleister
Crowley: Magick, SamuelWeiser,
York Beach, Maine, 1973, p. 60 5.
Crowley, p. 332 6.
Crowley, p. 294 7.
AntonLaVey: The
Satanic Bible, Avon, 1969, p.
110 8. LaVey, p. 110 9. LaVey, p. 41 10.
MichaelAquino: General
Information and Admissions Policies, Temple of
Set, San
Francisco, California, 1994, p.
4. 11. LaVey, p. 94 12. PeterCarroll: Liber
Null and Psychonaut, SamuelWeiser,
York Beach, Maine, 1987, p.
154 13. Carroll, p. 165 14.
Carroll, p. 103 15.
Carroll, p. 167 16.
Carroll, p. 151 17.
AustinOsmanSpare: Book of
Pleasure (Self-Love), from From the Inferno to
Zos: The Writings and Images of AustinOsmanSpare, First
Impressions, Seattle, 1993 , p.
7 18. Spare, p. 7 19. Spare, p. 9 20.
Spare, p. 30 21. Spare, p. 30 22. Spare, p.
33 21. Spare, p. 51 22. Spare, p. 37 23.
Spare, p. 38 24. Spare, p. 47 25. Spare, p.
48 26. Spare, p. 48 27. Spare, p. 44 28.
Spare, p. 44 29. Spare, p. 44 30. Spare, p.
44 31. Spare, p. 31 32. Spare, p. 51 33.
Carroll, p. 20 34.
Spare, p. 50 35. Frater U.D. :
Practical Sigil Magick, Llewellyn, 1991, p. 6 36.
Translation of the Heart Sutra in RoshiPhilipKapleau:
Zen Dawn in the West, Anchor Books, Anchor
Press/Doubleday, New
York, 1980, p. 180 37.
Fischer-Schrieber, Erhard & Diener, tr.
MichaelKohn: The Shambhala
Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen, Shambhala,
Boston 1991, p.
152 38. StephenMace: Stealing
the Fire from Heaven, Privately Printed,
New Haven, Connecticut, 1984, p.
20 39. Jan Fries: Visual Magick: A Manual of
Freestyle Shamanism, Mandrake, Oxford, 1992, p.
16 40. Genesis-P-Orridge, interviewed by
JayKinney in Gnosis, Summer
1994, p.52 41. Kinney, p. 53 42. Fries, p.
22 43. Fries, p. 35 44. JohnCage quoted in
Williams & Tollett: A Blip in the Continuum,
Peachpit Press, Berkeley,
California, 1995, p.81 45.
PeterCarroll: Liber
Kaos, SamuelWeiser,
YorkBeach, 1992,
p.53 to 75.
|
__________________ When patterns are
broken, new worlds emerge. -Tuli
Kupferberg
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07-24-2004, 10:17 AM |
#3 |
Member
Grey Magician is Offline:
Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 89 |
WOW i don't think ive read that much in a long
time. I know have a whole lot better understanding of
Chaos Magic and have learned that my beliefs tend to be
on the line of Chaos Magic. I think im going to read
more into it. Im sure alot of people are intimidated by
long threads but this one is worth it. Thanks Mmothra,
it was very
insightful.
Sincerely,
GM |
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|
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07-24-2004, 11:29 AM |
#4 |
Member
Nalyd23 is Online:
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Right where I am now.
Posts: 444 |
Since you liked that one so much Grey Magician,
here is the "Servitors" part of that as well.
Unfortunately the "Godforms" part either hasn't been
written or is just not available yet.
Quote:
Servitors
Part
Two of Sigils, Servitors, and
Godforms
by Marik
Servitors, Psychodynamics
and Models of Magick
Chaos Magick, at
least if approached by through the internet and
conversation with chaos magicians, can appear a
sprawling, contradictory mess of techniques to the
newcomer. The relativistic stance of Chaos Magick,
and it's apparent lack of a unifying template can
appear both morally disturbing and intellectually
frustrating, especially to occultists coming to it
from more traditional paths. Frater U.D., in a
small essay published in 1991, provided a clearer
approach to chaos magick by declaring it to be a
meta-model, a fifth approach to magick. The other
four he defined as the Spirit Model (used by
shamans and traditional ceremonial magicians, in
which autonomous entities exist in a dimension
accessible to ours through altered states of
consciousness); the Energy Model (where the world
is viewed as being 'vitalized' by energy currents
that the magician manipulates); the Psychological
Model (in which the magician is seen as "a
programmer of symbols and different states of
consciousness," manipulating the the individual
and the deep psyche); and the information model
(where information is the code that programs the
essentially neutral energy of the life force).
Frater U.D. points out that writers on chaos
magick generally subscribe to a great extent to
the Psychological Model, but, their approach
utilizes a Meta-Model, which is really a set of
instructions on how to use the other models. One
of the most salient facts about chaos magick, and
one of the most difficult for many newcomers to
grasp, is that it is not really a magickal
philosophy at all, it is really a technology, an
approach, or stance towards magickal systems. The
path to this was a result of chaos magicians
developing and then transcending the Psychological
Model. This essay on servitors while discussing
many of the practical issues in the creation and
deployment of servitors also elucidates the
relationship between chaos magickal theory and
modern psychology.
Modern magicians,
chaos magicians, contemporary sorcerers, and the
other magickal users of servitors appear to have
adopted a modified psychodynamic view of
personality, and the way in which we identify
ourselves. This view, first expounded by Freud and
the other founders of psychoanalysis (Jung, Adler,
etc.), suggests that the way in which we view
ourselves develops over time, and motivational
syndromes (what we want and how we go about
getting it) are critical to this development. This
is quite a different view than type or trait
personality theories which were in favor
throughout most of Western history (man is
composed of a compound of four or five elements,
for example). Chaos magicians tend to display more
of a situationist stance to personality, that is
to say they tend to act as though the situation in
which one finds oneself is the dominant factor in
observable behaviors. Chaos magicians also tend to
suggest that this is a good thing, since it means
the personality can be used opportunistically, as
a tool to achieve desires. This stance also
reflects Buddhist and Eastern views of the Self,
which either repudiate its existence as a
permanent construction, or state that its
essential nature can only be discovered through
profoundly altered states of consciousness
(samadhi).
Phil Hine, in his excellent
pamphlet "Chaos Servitors, a User Guide" writes of
the self:
"I prefer the analogy of the self as
an organic city-entity, where some portions are
more prominent than others, where there are
hidden tunnels and sewers, and where the under
levels carry vital energies to buildings. The
city-self is continually changing and growing -
tear down a building of belief, and another
grows back in its place." Austin
Osman Spare was clearly influenced by
psychodynamic theories of the self, as well as
Eastern ones, and the general magickal theory he
passed on to us embody these ideas. Primarily
concerned with motivation (desire), Spare wrote in
"The Book of Pleasure":
"The 'self' is the
'Neither-Neither,' nothing omitted,
indissoluble, beyond prepossession; dissociation
of conception by its own invincible love is the
only true, safe, and free...This Self-Love is
now declared by me the means of evolving
millions of ideas for pleasure without love, or
its synonyms-self-reproach, sickness, old age,
and death. The Symposium of self and love. O!
Wise Man, Please Thyself." Note
the combination of psychoanalytic vocabulary and
Vedic metaphysics combined with an insistence on
motivation as fundamental.
Now a servitor
is generally considered to be a part of the
personality of the magician that has been severed
from him. I would argue that this is a limited
view of servitors, that they could be considered
severed portions of the Deep Mind, and
consequently not located in the psyche of any
particular magician. In my view demons, angels,
imaginary friends, poltergeists and perhaps even
ghosts are servitors. Servitors can be called
thought-forms (as opposed to godforms which may
sometimes be servitors on steroids).
Since
contemporary magickal stances to personality are
psychodynamic and motivational servitors tend to
be viewed as functional entities, and rather
easily operated. Contrast this with the type and
trait theories that inform Traditional Ceremonial
Magick. Magicians up until this century (and still
some today) spend what seems to me ridiculous
amounts of time and effort evoking demons, using
grimoires, and engaging in a paraphernalia of
magick that makes a great deal of sense if you
believe in type and trait theories of
personalities, but very little if your approach is
situational and pyschodynamic. If you believe that
a demon you summon is a wholly independent entity
with a personality type all of its own you may
have to resort to extreme measures to force it to
do your bidding. If you believe that a demon is a
servitor summoned as a manifestation of your
desire then a simple bargain will suffice (I'll
give you energy, you get what I want, I'll give
you a nice place to live).
What
is a Servitor?
Motivational syndromes
(desire) are fundamental to Spare's form of
magick, hence the name of his most popular book,
"The Book of Pleasure." Spare and magicians, Chaos
or otherwise, have adopted the Jungian expansion
of Freud's theory of the Unconscious. Jung
theorized the existence of a collective
unconscious, shared by all. He considered it to be
transpersonal and the residue of the evolution of
humankind. I personally prefer Jan Fries' term,
the Deep Mind, but it comes to much the same
thing. Spare, who called the collective
unconscious the sub-consciousness characterized it
as follows:
"Know the sub-consciousness to be an
epitome of all experiences and wisdom, past
incarnations as men, animals, birds, vegetable
life, etc. , etc., everything that exists, has
and ever will exist." Both Spare
and Peter Carroll attempted to develop a technical
vocabulary to describe the phenomena and
techniques of the type of magick posited by Spare.
Carroll, both FireClown and I believe, was trying
to construct a vocabulary that could be used by
magicians of any type. FireClown calls this a
"discussional template", or a way in which, for
example, thelemites could talk to wiccans without
misunderstanding each other. Unfortunately
Carroll's use of the hierarchical gambit resulted
in this vocabulary becoming exclusionary.
A fine example of this is the term
"servitor." The time predates Chaos Magick and can
be found to refer to bound spirits in the fiction
of Clark Ashton Smith, who was writing for Weird
Tales in the 1930s. Servitor is actually a word
referring to entities that actualize through
evocation, a magickal technique as old as magick
itself. Carroll writes
"These beings have a legion of names
drawn from the demonology of many cultures:
elementals, familiars, incubi, succubi,
bud-wills, demons, atavisms, wraiths, spirits,
and so on." Spare seems to
indicate that these entities are bound to
obsessions, that is to say the magician,
experiencing an obsession (a way the psyche tells
the magician that it desires something), forms
part of the sub-consciousness into a
semi-independent phenomenon that will do the work
needed to actualize the magician's desire. Carroll
disagrees somewhat, although he allows that such
beings have their origin in the human mind. Phil
Hine whose interest in his User's Guide to
Servitors is the creation of such beings writes:
"By deliberately budding off
portions of our psyche and identifying them by
means of a name, trait, symbol, we can come to
work with them (and understand how they affect
us) at a conscious level." So at
least in the type of magick developed by Spare,
Carroll, and Phil Hine, a servitor is a part of
the magician's psyche, or a part of the Deep Mind
that the magician evokes to perform a task. Do
these entities have an existence prior to their
evocation? Perhaps. Magick is trans-temporal,
trans-spatial. If the Deep Mind contains all
experience that has been or ever will be then the
question is meaningless, or as Blake wrote:
"Everything that can be Believed is
an Image of the Truth." I do think
that the use of servitors is widespread among many
people who would not dream of considering
themselves magicians. People personalize their
cars, have imaginary friends as children, or give
personalities to their toys, carry objects they
consider to be "lucky" with them or allow their
obsessions to absorb their personalities so they
turn into demons. Many movies deal with servitors,
Natural Born Killers being an obvious example,
Tetsudo, a fine Japanese flick being an even more
obvious example. In NBK the demons are eventually
reintegrated and the two killers stop killing. The
fine film Seven is essentially a magickal ritual
in which the murderer uses people as the material
bases for servitors, in this case representing the
demons of the Seven Deadly Sins.
To my
mind these are all examples of the use of
servitors because they follow Hine's simple
definition of servitors as budded off portions of
the psyche or personality developed for a simple
or complex purpose which gain a semi-independent
existence. Of course in the case of demons
absorbing the personality the act is hardly
adaptive, although it may have started out that
way.
I'll tell you a story. I had a friend
about 12 years ago, a charming, handsome young
man, intelligent, athletic, and sober. He used to
baby-sit another friend's teenage daughter. It
turned out that he was a serial rapist. He would
stalk women, rape them, and beat them nearly to
death. He got caught because he fell asleep in his
car outside his last victim's apartment and was
found by the police covered with his victim's
blood. I have no doubt he would have ended up
murdering his future victims. Fortunately he is
unlikely to ever have that chance.
Now
what I think had happened with this man was that,
perhaps as a result of some inability to integrate
his rage towards women, he budded off a part of
his personality, the violent, woman hating part,
which became a demon, a semi-independent servitor.
When his obsession was triggered it activated the
demon which then completely possessed him and he
became an utterly different person. For all I know
he wasn't even conscious of the demon himself.
None of his friends ever saw this demon,
didn't even have a glimpse, but his victims surely
did.
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.
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.
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. marik New
Orleans,
1998
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__________________ There is NO coincidence! EVERYTHING is a
hint from “Bob’ if you LISTEN! What about the MIBS? I’ll
tell you about the foolish black-suited killers who
embrace so-called “Organized” religion lovingly. The
MIBS want leaders and priests as STUPID as they are.
They are the FAILED PATH, the REJECTS! The SubGenius
HATES them! Cthulhu is NOT A JOKE! He - even worse than
the godLIKE posers without the true word of “Bob” -
KILLS and worse than kills, it is fated to FAIL by the
grace of “Bob”!
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07-24-2004, 11:37 PM |
#5 |
subliminal/venereal
visceral/spagyrical is Offline:
Join Date: Jun 2004
Posts: 394 |
Ooh, thanks for reminding me about this stuff. I
read the both of those I think about six months ago and
absolutely loved them. Marik's Zippy has got to
be one of the best examples of using magic I've ever
read.
v/s
__________________ "Knowledge kills life."
-Gopal
"Can you handle the knowledge, bitch!?"
-Todd Jensen
"Everybody's gotta learn sometime."
-James Warren
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Yesterday, 09:27 AM |
#6 |
New Member
FraterSkeptikos is Offline:
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Portugal
Posts: 14 |
I mailed the author asking for the third part of
the article but still got no reply. If i get one i´ll
say something to you...
__________________ Skeptic:
1. One who instinctively or habitually doubts,
questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally
accepted conclusions. |
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