Chaos magick and working with demons.

[Accipeveldare]

Since the gist of chaos magick is that belief is what manifests things into reality. Would that make demons simply dormant forces/entities?

 

[Pyrokar]

no.
but elaborate

Would that make demons simply dormant forces/entities?

what did you mean by this?

 

[Accipeveldare]

no.
but elaborate

what did you mean by this?

Well, would it make sense that demons aren't exactly supernatural beings but instead are just forces you can use. Perhaps they aren't exactly conscious beings but instead are forces to be wielded?

Post automatically merged: Jul 30, 2024

I don't necessarily believe this but it came across my mind

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I would say that they would be servitors/egregores/tulpas in Chaos magic.

 

[Accipeveldare]

I would say that they would be servitors/egregores/tulpas in Chaos magic.

Fair enough. That actually does make a lot more sense.

 

[Khoren_]

don't forget about god-forms! they're just tools too

 

[HoldAll]

In "Secret Angel Magick", Adam Blackthorne/GoM, author of "The Master Works of Chaos Magick", has this to say about the spirits described in the book:

The book is suitable for beginners because one of the big secrets of these spirits is that they are very easy to work with. You need nothing other than the letters of their name. That’s it. You can make the rest up if you like. That’s such a big secret that many people have missed out on the scope of the power that can be obtained. [...] It might come as a shock to find that The Genius Spirits and The Angels of Omnipotence aren’t spirits in the usual sense. While they are real, conscious, and even have personalities (of sorts), and a strong sense of reality, all these spirits were crafted by people. They are servitors, conscious beings, threaded together by occultists to forge a direct connection to the greatest Angels and Archangels.

So these spirits were already manifested into reality in the past, to use your expression & according to Blackthorne's thinking, and there are even venerable historical precedents - you could easily argue that the 72 Shem angels are nothing but synthetic beings whose names were randomly created based on certain Kabbalistic permutations of an Old Testament verse. On the other hand, there are also these myths of created beings taking on a life of their own, like the golem or Frankenstein's monster (or humans, come to think of it) so they might not be so easily controlled as immediately after their inception... especially when they have the momentum of tradition behind them. The Goetia demons might be nothing but the results of the author's random personal gnosis, too but they're a lot older than Lovecraft's entities, for example.

Treat them like servitors/egregores, and that's what you get, I suppose. Ok, go ahead, fool around with those 'created' spirits but at your own peril, traditionalists would probably add.

 

[Xenophon]

don't forget about god-forms! they're just tools too

Careful with the "just." Chainsaws, cars, guns are also just tools, but they can turn pretty unforgiving if established safety procedures are not faithfully followed.

Personally, I think explosives might offer a better analogy. Useful stuff for mining ores or building roads. But some of them can be damned dangerous if jarred, subject to static electricity, or even unseasonable heat. Moreover, as HoldAll notes, a number of occult agents have documented histories, so we're not just spinning them out of whole cloth. Certain ritual behaviors seem to open the circuit to such powers. Chaos magick gets it right in its claim that the powers are not necessarily scrupulous about names and rites. Some chaos magicians get it wrong in concluding that 1) the mage creates said powers; 2) that said powers are therefore necessarily at his behest. "1)" is sometimes tenable; going from "1)" to "2)" is sometimes juggling the nitroglycerin jug.

Anton Long has an interesting article about names, entities, and their tenuous relation. If I recall correctly it's called "Denotatum" (some such unwieldy title.)

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Treat them like servitors/egregores, and that's what you get, I suppose. Ok, go ahead, fool around with those 'created' spirits but at your own peril, traditionalists would probably add.

You read a lot of anecdotes about people specifically creating 'ordinary' servitors and then the servitors turn out not to obey them very well (or ofc too well). So that's clearly on the mage.

Add into that the idea that you are working with angels (even if they are actually a kind of servitor) and then, as @HoldAll and @Xenophon say, you had better handle with care. They will be what you pretend them to be.

 

[S.ROB]

There was a book about initiation into chaos from daemonic dreams but cannot remember its name and not allowed to say.

 

[Sabbatius]

Treat them like servitors/egregores, and that's what you get, I suppose. Ok, go ahead, fool around with those 'created' spirits but at your own peril, traditionalists would probably add.

Egregores abound in most cultures, as do god-forms. There are even some found in Animistic social groups, unintentionally "manifested."

 

[Shade]

As Robert stated, they would be Seritors or Egregores, however as a chaos magician it’s not uncommon to… “dabble?” (Very poor choice of although as chaos magicians entities are typically seen more as an aspect of our psyche, which once again falls into the servitor/egregore aspect except these are more ancient ones in a collective psyche. and ofc just because your a chaos magician doesn’t mean you can’t use grimoires or their methods as tools, We just avoid dogmatism.
“If nothing is true, everything is permitted”
This follows closely to the idea or theory that the “All is mind and the mind is all”.

 

[Xenophon]

Demons are like butterflies. Collect now, classify later. Or, with demons, evoke. At least that way one has first-hand evidence to hang a conjecture on. There are any number of experienced magi out there who disagree as to how best to describe demons. This includes some who freely allow that multiple characterizations are possible and that no one exactly fits.