conpantheons and spiritual servitors
before reading, please keep in mind that this post is based on my experiences and my thoughts on these topics. if you disagree, i'd love to hear from you in the comments or reblogs!
what's even the difference?
a conpantheon can be defined in two ways:
1) a pantheon that a person creates from the ground up through thoughtform manifestation. this includes the stories, names, faces and domains of the spirits.
2) a pantheon that contains spirits that already existed, the practitioner just gives names, faces, or general stories to them.
thoughtform creation is something i would consider a fairly advanced bit of magic. that doesn't necessarily mean you need to have any amount of years under your belt, just that you need certain skills to be well developed before you can start, and im not really there yet.
the hardest part is anchoring thoughts to form, whether that be a physical or astral one. im still designing a ritual for this, and i don't even know if ill end up sharing that.
to me, these are two different kinds of conpantheons, but the ideas for how they form don't have to be mutually exclusive
spiritual servitors, on the other hand, fulfill the two below criteria:
1) they fulfill a specific purpose or purposes
2) they only exist for that purpose, or for a specific time period
spiritual servitors are manifestations of the practitioners will, and are almost always temporary. if the same spirit is recreated over and over again, though, that would seem to fit under this term as well.
why one or the other?
a conpantheon often works better for practitioners who feel called to certain spirits or domains but can't connect with existing deities or spirits that have been named and fleshed out already. to me, i basically stumbled headfirst into this shit. i just felt so drawn to these animals and the environment around me that i started creating them in my head before i even knew what a conpantheon was. i felt drawn to these stories, these names, these faces.
a spiritual servitor often works better for witches or pagans who already have a number of spirits or gods at their side, or if they're not at the point to be keeping up with the maintenance of a full pantheon.
creation and maintenance
the best way to create a conpantheon, in my experience, is just to start writing shit down. the more you write, whether it be full thoughts or partial glimpses, the further you'll get. meditate often, pull some cards or throw some bones, go on a walk. try to see the undercurrents of energy that flows all around us, find where they meet and give it a name. introduce yourself. take notes and pictures and just breathe it all in. this is your journey, not anyone elses, and that's what's beautiful about this experience. there's no one here to judge you, no one to make your choices for you. it should be terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. this is the spell i use for upkeep of my conpantheon, on top of regular offerings.
for spiritual servitors, there's often a certain ritual surrounding their creation. from what i've seen, most people will take an idea or a spell, create a sigil for it, and then imbue that sigil with its own power. kind of like sicking your dog on someone--it only goes where you tell it to go, and it will "come back" (end) when it's done.
in my opinion, you could absolutely elevate a spiritual servitor to a conpantheon, or ask your conpantheon to act as a servitor, which is why i conjoined these ideas into one post. the line between the two is fairly grey for a lot of practitioners, and that's totally okay! these are terms to serve us, to describe what we're doing, not dictate it.