Spirits, photo by Thomas AndersonHaving 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, a la Austin Spare (or so it is claimed), that serves as the servitors will.1 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? Another good exercise, so I have been told, is to find some road kill, and after poo-pooing the inconsiderate driver, take it into a room WHERE YOU WILL NOT BE DISTURBED and sit with it for about a week. Stare at it, allow your consciousness to encompass it, get to a point where you can feel the maggots crawling around inside. Get to the point when you can feel the new life in it, growing, eating and reproducing. Feel the distinction between perceiver and perceived diminish. You will feel the entire process of decomposition. These kind of exercise prove very useful at this stage because you will want to instil 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 preferred 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 out loud 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 fervour with caution.

-oOo-

Image credit: Thomas Anderson

  1. 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. []