Part 2, Intro to Chaos Magick
So, if you’ve been practicing as a chaos magician for a little while now, good work! If not, and this stuff sounds cool enough that you would like to get started, check out Chaos Magic 101 [here]!
After a bit of practice, you should now be well versed in things like firing sigils using the SPLIFF method (Remember, from [Oven Ready Chaos]), meditating, learning a divination system or two.
By now you may have also branched out and tested tech from other systems of magick like candle spells (If you’re unfamiliar, Aidan Wachter has a super straightforward method of doing this, which can be found [here]) or Jan Fries’ (author of the criminally underrated book Visual Magick, which you should definitely read and can be found [here]) Cup Meditation / Invocation. Not strictly necessary as of yet to have branched out a bit, but nice work if you’ve found something cool to do.
Either way, the notion that practice doing these things, not the theory behind them, is the best teacher still applies! So be sure to get out there and try some stuff!
After having done this whole chaos magick thing for a bit, you may be wondering where to go from here, or encountered some sort of problem that requires a solution little more finesse or a little more longevity than a sigil can provide. If this is the case, a viable solution may be constructing a servitor to complete the task at hand.
“But Key, What the Hell is a Servitor?”
I’m glad you asked! An easy way to think of a servitor when you’re still a beginner is as a sigil that has come alive; some small creature that’s reason for being is solving a problem, completing a task, manipulating the probability of an outcome, or something along those lines. There’s a bit more nuance to it than that (if you’re really curious, and willing to be more than a little confused, there are some good theory discussions found [here]) but for now this operative explanation should hold up just fine.
“Okay, so how do I make a servitor?”
So here’s where things can get a little weird. From what I’ve seen, there isn’t one super uniform and universally accepted way to do this. Also, there are a few examples [here] [here] of sigils somehow evolving into Servitors all on their own. That said, there are a number of internally consistent methods and ideas that chaos magicians utilize regardless of procedure.
From this, I propose the following general model, which has been pieced together through a combination of my own experience, the experiences of extremely good chaos magicians, resources available in print, and resources available on chaosmatrix for use here:
0. Banish [Banish] [Banish]
1. Decide on a goal and state it out loud with as much conviction and certainty as you can. Classically this is just called the statement of intent, which was and still can be a big deal for old chaos magick rites.
2. Decide on a name for the servitor. Make this something a bit uncommon, such that a friend won’t bop in to your room and accidentally call the name of a thought ghost and ask it to bring them a coke.The necessity of names is a mildly warm take with a lot of discourse surrounding it but I find this to be an important step for a lot of reasons:
- names have power, the act of naming someone or something has a ton of weight behind it
- it’s an easy way to address and call up the servitor
- in the event something goes wrong, names are a classic (some of the oldest “western” magick we know of, seen [here], does this way to gain magical leverage and increase the efficacy of what you’re doing.
3. Make 2 sigils as you learned to do in Oven Ready Chaos. The first one will be just like a normal sigil that you’d make to solve this problem. For example, let’s say you’re making a servitor to draw money. You can use a phrase like “it is my will to more frequently find and acquire usable currency” and turn it into a sigil. The second sigil will be the name of your Servitor. Draw these together at the top of a sheet of paper or make some digital art and put it at the top of a document. Draw a circle around them or superimpose these sigils to link them together graphically.
4. Write what’s called the Contract for your Servitor. This is an actual written document that you create that goes through a few super important things:
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a.) The linked sigils of the servitor up at the top (as seen in the last bit of step 3)
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b.) A phrase linking the sigils and animating the servitor with a goal. This can read something like “I name you (name): in doing so I give you life. I shape you in the image of (what you want the Servitor to look like, which I’ll get to later): in doing so I give you form”
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c.) A specific and detailed description of what you want the Servitor to do
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d.) A clause along the lines of “in accomplishing your goals you will not bring harm to any being that I care about” if that’s a thing that matters to you
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e.) A “Self destruct procedure” That allows you to destroy the Servitor in a very straightforward way. I’ve heard methods of doing this ranging from putting the contract into a fire to saying a nonsense phrase like “your ship has sailed, and that ship is the banana boat to flavor town. May you deep fry in peace” (I shit you not- if there’s one thing us crusty old chaos magicians have it’s a sense of humor). Whatever you do for this, ensure that the procedure won’t just happen accidentally and leaves no room for ambiguity. Also, quick note, THIS STEP IS VERY IMPORTANT DO NOT FORGET TO DO THIS
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f.) Some way to link the Servitor to you, if that’s a thing that’s important to the goal.
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g.) a method of “feeding” or some way that the Servitor can gain ~energy~ after the fact. This will generally take the form of standard offerings to spirits, such as waiving the contract through incense a few times a month, burning a candle down over the contract every so often, stuff like that.
5. Astute readers may now realize that we’ve kinda gone through the SPL of SPLIFF, so now naturally we move to the I and the first F (hopefully by now you see that there is a huge amount of cross-over between sigils and servitors, which will be discussed at great length along with egregores and godforms in a later post), Intense Gnosis and Fire. For servitor creation, I have found that you need to much deeper into the gnostic state than for anything you would normally do, which takes a lot of practice and experience (and often, although not strictly necessary, in conjunction with a large quantity of psychoactive or otherwise mind-altering substances… quick disclaimer, don’t be dumb. I’m just some dude on the internet so don’t be an idiot with what you choose to do here).
6. While in this deep gnostic state, you will strongly visualize the form of the servitor along with the sigils, as mentioned in steps 3 and 4b. Things will generally get weird by now, but just roll with it. along with this visualization, you will “fire” the linked sigils of the servitor.
7. Perform a beefy preliminary feeding in order to further empower the servitor via whatever method you decided upon in step 4g
8. Set then servitor on its merry way and banish super hard.
Now you may notice that I left out the second F in SPLIFF, and this is entirely intentional. It is important that you do not forget about your servitors, or else they may “go rogue”, meaning they may try to subvert your goals in addition to gaining pseudo-sentience which is usually problematic. This can cause a lot of problems later on down the road (astral parasite anyone?), so it’s advised that at the early signs of a servitor going rogue (such as problems with functionality, mild poltergeist activity, problems with feeding, divination telling you something is wrong relation to function or work, etc) to evaluate the contact and the methods of feeding. At this point, if a workable, fast solution does not become apparent, deletion is recommended.
Servitors going rogue is a problem faced by many people when they are beginners, including me back in the day (my former roommate still thinks that the dorm is haunted, sorry bud), but it’s a nice experience to have at some point in terms of learning what to do when magick inevitably explodes in your face and addressing it in an intelligent, workable manor. Plus, how will you ever learn if you don’t try? As always, practice over theory.
So that’s about it for the method, so let’s see what the practice may actually look like.
Let’s say you, a budding chaote, decide that you could use a bit more love in your life. Although you’ve found that sigils are nice for some one-off scenarios like finding a hookup at a club or a bar, you want something a bit longer lasting.
As such, you decide that a servitor is the right solution for you.
You decide upon the statement of intent, “It is my will to encounter a compassionate romantic partner” and turn it into a glyph. You also decide on the
name FlimFlamZimZam for the servitor and make this into a glyph as well, combining it with the first. You run through the GPR twice to fully banish before the rest of the process. You write up a contract, stating that you want the servitor to function until you enter into a romantic relationship with a caring partner, after which the servitor will cease to exist. You ensure the inclusion of a destruct code, and add your spit atop the combined glyphs to link the servitor to you alone. You also include that you’ll burn a stick of musk incense atop the contract once a week until the task is complete. You then enter a state of intense excitatory gnosis by downing a few caffeine pills and listening to [this] on loop at max volume for an hour or so. You enter the deep, trance-like gnosis, and visualize the servitor atop the seal, shaping it into what you want it to be. After the state winds down, you light some musk as per the contract and banish with the GPR once more.
Afterwards, you pull a tarot card, asking about the state of the servitor. You draw The World upright, indicating that the servitor is up and at ‘em finding you a partner already. You decide that this is good enough, so you put on your favorite sweater and black skinny jeans, head to your favorite coffee shop, only to have the cute guy from your linguistics seminar sit down next to you, offer to get you a cappuccino, and awkwardly ask you to see a New Primals show later that night. You go to the show and have a complete blast, and enter into a fun little relationship for the rest of the semester.
Hope that this helps out and provides some clarity in the murky world of creating servitors. If you got any questions or just want to talk magick, feel free to drop me an ask or shoot me a DM.
This has been Chaos Magick 102 of the Chaos Magic for Beginners series, where there will be more posts on a variety of subjects coming soon.
-Key
Chaos magick isn’t exactly my bag now, but what I practice has deep roots in chaos magick. There is some good shit here, but I wish the author would have done what EVERY teacher of magick should do. Say up front, “This is one way to do it. It has worked for me. Your mileage may vary.”
Servitors are a particular interest of mine, as I have done some intense work making complex servitors. Here is what I have learned, once again, this may or may not work for you personally.
For me, the important thing to understand about making complex servitors is a true acceptance that time is an illusion. You are not just making a spirit out of thin air. You can’t create a complex personality with complex thoughts, and thus capable of complex tasks, without it having a history. Any being is the sum of their experiences. You must treat a complex servitor not as something that just sprang into existence, but as something that has always existed. You can create some of that history, but much of it must come about organically. You do this by examining experiences in your past, and looking for the influence of the servitor. Then extrapolate what other experiences the servitor must have had, in order to make it the being that it is now. If you are shooting for something that is relatively human, which I have, a good understanding of psychology is a must and an understanding of how trauma and triumph shape a being’s core beliefs and motives.
It’s a shit ton of work and a long process. It has been worth it for me.
Does this kind of work have dangers like the OP suggested? Absolutely. But magick has no safety net. Keep evolving your practice. That is key. Also, one of the reasons simple servitors with no history fuck up so much is they have no grounding. Get a bunch of them together and it’s like Lord of the Flies.
