What is a Servitor?
Demons, imaginary friends, guardian angels, sprites, elementals, fairies, and practically any other type of entity can be defined as a servitor if it is bound by you and charged with a special function.
Servitors can be considered bits of one’s psyche that have been given a certain amount of independence. For example, FireClown has a bookfinding servitor that brings him the books he seeks. FireClown, being a bit bibliophilic, always has a list of arcane and usually out of print books or pamphlets he wants, but he is unwilling to spend every free minute wandering through SF’s billion used bookstores. So he lets his servitor do it for him, and the books appear. Often a friend will say, weren’t you looking for this particular book? etc… FireClown will tell you, if you wish, how he created this servitor. William Blake had servitors that taught him painting and also, by the looks of one of his illustrations, swept his floors. How good of a job his domestic servant servitor did is not recorded, to my knowledge, but the one that taught him painting was certainly very talented and did a fine job.
marik, The Z(Cluster) Mailing List (found on Chaos Matrix)
To me, the best descriptive name applied to what Carroll and many Chaotes call a servitor is “bud-will”, although I also frequently call them “fetches” as well. I see them as a disembodied attribute of desire; in other words, servitors are manufactured entities with a singular purpose to their existence. One could also think of a servitor as the ghost of an obsession that has been exorcized from its home and can return to it only when it has united itself with the object of it’s desire.
Once created, I think servitors have a limited degree of free will - limited by the scope of the desire they have been created to achieve. I don’t think they can cognize or perform actions not related to fulfilling their initial objective. They are a ball of higher-energy seeking to return to a state of lower energy by dissipating the force that binds them into externality by uniting with an object (as E.E. Rehmus wrote, “an arrow never forgets its target”). For me, the defining criterion that makes something a servitor is that it is always under the control of its creator, in that its very existence is bound inextricably to its creator’s desire.
Tzimon Yliaster, The Z(Cluster) Mailing List (found on Chaos Matrix)
Servitor Creation - A Contemporary Approach
Having used the following methods to great success, I must still emphasize my approach as being a mere guideline with plenty of room left for personal interpretation and experimentation. Historically the magician has called upon the services of entities of his own manufacture in order to render services ranging from the benevolent to the malefic. It would seem the approaches to their creation have varied as widely as their specific purpose. I offer the following as a personal approach to their manufacture.
To begin, I have found it useful to incorporate what I call a skeletal sigil as the first step in the construction. This is basically a pictorial sigil, ala Austin Spare (or so it is claimed), that serves as the servitors will. (Note: it has been suggested to me that bind-runes could also be used for this application, for those who work within that system, this may be worth investigating.) It must be kept in mind that all things that coincide with its “will” will be pursued and all other ignored. Consider also that having a servitor to “do my bidding” “bring me luck” etc. suffers the same problems as sigils with similar nebulous directives. Servitors given the initial will that incorporates very specific directives and goals seem to work much better. Moreover, creating a complex series of skeletal sigils and instilling “life-force” in the servitor to such a degree as to give it great sentience makes it particularly difficult to reabsorb later. Having had problems with relatively stupid entities, I have not yet the fortitude (or lack of sense) to create an extremely “smart” creature. Incorporating a single “will” sigil should be sufficient to the task at hand and is recommended to the beginner.
Once you have created this skeletal sigil, it is time to flesh it. Without being conscious of its original intent, stare at the sigil in as deep a trance as possible. Go to the hum. Make your space-time become cave-like and moist. Look at the sigil, let it move, give it form, give it what it needs to live, etc. You are trying to get to a point where you can completely visualize this beast of your own creation, so you can empower it. Let your imagination run wild as the sigil pulses with form and purpose. Remember, you must become intimately familiar with its form, so let it stabilize before you continue on with something else. You will know when you are finished with this part when you can recall, smell, feel the thing in its entirety from all perspectives without permutations. You will be surprised with what you end up with.
Now we empower the critter. With the servitor completely visualized, in a place conductive to this phase, allow your consciousness to engulf it. A good thing to practice is listening to and feeling your own automatic functions. How do they feel to you? What does the energy feel like that animates your being? What does “the breath of life” feel, taste, sound like? These kind of exercises prove very useful at this stage because you will want to instill and become” aware of these processes of life within your servitor to a very acute degree and “nourish” it with these animating principles. Again, know the energy that you will be using to animate it. I recommend an Orphidian method of empowerment. As with visualisation, you will want to continue this nurturing phase until all of the life systems are stable. No fluctuation allowed. This may take a considerable amount of time, patience and energy. After stabilization, you may find it a good time for naming.
Following the empowerment phase (and whenever the entities services are needed) it is advisable to incorporate rituals specific to the instruction of the servitor. Make sure your specific task coincides with its prime directive. (Don’t have an entity with a martial aire go looking solely for money, you may have to fight for it!) For example, if an entity called, “Braga”, had as its prime directive “to find a new sex partner” (as articulated in the skeletal sigil) one would call it up in a ritual and instruct it to “make your aid available at the party tonight”. This “instructional” phase is what you will resort to when specific tasks are required of the psychodenizen. I personally prefer simple pathworkings after a meditative period in which I “sync-up” with the creature, although Enochian calls may be prefered by some and simple English commands by others. I must emphasize the importance of applying scientific method to one’s own intuitive faculties.
At this point, what you choose to do specifically will depend entirely on the entities’ task.
Finally, you will get to a point when you will want to absorb the creature. Speaking from a painful experience, the entities do not want to be absorbed. This is natural considering the amount of work that went into their manufacture. To illustrate, a while back, when we had just started such work of which the first part was the absorption of previously created entities. All I’ll say is by the time we ended that night that I ended up with 13 stitches in my head (blood everywhere) and a bad haircut.
I have found it advisable to take the initial sigil in hand, repeating the will sentence outloud over and over again, while understanding that what was an independently created and fleshed desire, was yours all along. Its power was your power. Visualize it dissolving into a pure-energy state which you draw back into yourself. All this should take place in an suitable atmosphere where you can make it as intense and effective as possible. It is crucial to make sure you have all your bases covered.
The possibilities are many, and may I suggest that you temper an experimental fervor with caution.
Fra.: Negentrophy, The Chaos Matrix
See also: Split Attention