For those new to chaos magic, or who are unfamiliar with the terminology, a servitor is an entity created by a magician to perform certain tasks autonomous from its creator.
Phil Hine writes in Condensed Chaos: Adventures in Chaos Magic that servitors are essentially a kind of psychological complex created "by deliberately budding off portions of our psyche and identifying them by means of a name, trait, symbol", after which "we can come to work with them (and understand how they affect us) at a conscious level.”
Servitors can be created to perform a wide range of tasks, from the specific to the general, and may be considered as expert systems which are able to modify themselves to take into account new factors that are likely to arise whilst they are performing their tasks. They can be programmed to work within specific circumstances, or to be operating continually.
Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos: Adventures in Chaos Magic (New Falcon Publications, 1998)
Note: While some purport that servitors are a part of a ‘thoughtform continuum’, starting with ‘unintelligent’ sigils and eventually getting to the complexity of egregores and godforms, I think it would be prudent to mention that I don’t think I agree with the distinctions people tend to make between servitors and thoughtforms, namely that servitors are simpler and have less agency than thoughtforms. I can see why it may be helpful for some to keep them disparate but I find the separation unnecessary especially since there are certainly instances where servitors can be sophisticated enough to harbor agency and even intellect.
Generally, I’ve seen magicians follow a model similar to Austin Osman Spare’s sigil creation technique to encode a particular intention for a servitor to operate within. Alternatively, a magician may choose to create servitors from negative aspects of their psyche so they can interact with those traits as personal ‘demons’ and eradicate them. This is to say there are probably limitless ways you can program a servitor to aid you in your magical and mundane life.
When creating a servitor, I begin with a similar mindset as creating any other magical tool by first determining my intentions. What do I need help with? What am I seeking? Try to take note of the thoughts and emotions that are influencing your intentions and even try to imagine what things will be like after the task is complete; by collecting and holding all of this mental data during servitor creation, you can strengthen the complex it is born from.
Note: This is why I find there can be varying degrees of success when trying to use a servitor that someone else has created. While someone could have had great success with their servitor and enthusiastically shared the steps for its creation, you do not have the same psychological and magical ties to that entity and therefore may not really be tapping into what makes it tick.
During this inception process, also consider the level of sophistication you want your servitor to have. Ask yourself questions like:
Is your servitor made for one specific task and then it is banished or does it work in perpetuity (or until you stop it)?
Do you have to summon it each time you need it to perform a certain task? If so, how?
Is your servitor like a magical automaton, doing a set action like a machine, or can it learn from its experiences and adapt how it operates?
Does your servitor have a lifespan? Are you able to resummon the same entity if needed again or would you create a new version of itself?
Does your servitor have agency?
Does your servitor communicate? If so, how? Can it interact with other beings besides yourself?
Does your servitor require energy or sustenance? What does it require and how often?
By having set rules or constraints baked into the creation of your servitor, you can ensure it operates the way you want it to.
As you are thinking of all of this, picture what your servitor looks like, how it moves, if it has a sound or a voice—the more detail, the better.
Give your servitor a name and a sigil. You can create the sigil based on the servitor’s name or task using something like Austin Osman Spare’s sigilization technique or something more abstract. (My personal divination deck, much like Sakura Kinomoto’s cards in Cardcaptor Sakura, also houses an entity in each of the cards and the art on the card is essentially the entity’s sigil.)
Before launching your servitor, determine a ‘kill switch’ for the entity if anything goes sideways or you need it to cease working immediately for any reason. This can be a phrase or an action but make sure it is something you cannot accidentally do. If you connect your servitor to an object, simply destroying that object would also work.
Finally, with all of this information at hand, you can launch your servitor. You can do this as you would fire off any other sigil or you can choose to do something more ceremonial. (The defunct account @trollkunnig outlines a method of essentially ‘contracting’ a servitor in this post.) At this point, you can tether your servitor to an object, if you choose to do so. I have also connected a servitor to an additional object after its programmed task was completed with a renewed intention and a course of action should its original services be needed again.
This post is part of my Magi Praxis series. If you have any suggestions for future topics, or you have attempted anything I have shared and want you share your experiences, please send me a message! I am always happy to go back and provide further explanation as well. ☆
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