[Help] Servitors and Writing Fictional Characters

[Matt Spencer]

So I'm new to working with Servitors, starting with Damon Brand's book on the subject.

Mr. Brand, if you're around, I'd be especially keen on your advice about this, but anyone with the specific cross-section of expertise can also advise.

For Chaos Magick/Servitor Practitioners who are also fiction authors, I can't be the only one who notices the similarities in imaginative alchemy between writing vivid characters who come to life on the page to where they feel like they're writing themselves and redirecting the story and giving life to a Servitor.

While I realize the importance of keeping your Servitor's names and identities secret, I wondered if it's at all advisable to write them into one's stories as characters going under nom de plumes? Let them have adventures in your imaginative landscape, as it were? Might this have a bolstering effect on them? Diminishing? Indifferent? Has anyone played around with this?

Post automatically merged: Tuesday at 8:44 AM

Also, when creating multiple Servitors, since they're sentient beings and all...do they ever encounter and have conversations with each other, develop relationships, dynamics, comparing notes with each other?

 

[Lemnian]

In Magical Thought forms by Dolores Ashcroft Nowicki she writes:

“When a writer sits down to write a book, she has in mind a certain broad
outline of the plot. It may even be a fairly detailed plot. However, as any writer
will tell you, characters will almost certainly begin to take over at some point
in the narrative.

Authors use the same kind of thought forming processes to build characters
that you have been using to build astral forms, because that is exactly what a
character in a book is—an astral form. “
perhaps this book may answer some of your questions.

 

[ahathoor]

So everyone seems to approach the idea of servitors and thoughtforms differently, and with different caveats. I'll give you what I think of it, which may be in conflict with some of the things you have read. The way I understand it, a servitor is a spirit / thoughtform specifically summoned or created to fulfill a specific magical purpose. I would be absolutely wary of giving or attributing such an entity anything resembling a complex personality.

The metaphysics of fictional characters is more or less tangential to this. The question isn't whether servitors are like fictional characters, but rather whether they should be, and personally my answer to that is no. No, they absolutely shouldn't.

Say, you want to work a spell to help reverse desertification where you live. Say, there's some local old tales of swamp goblins from the times when the desert used to be swampland... You can summon / build on the swamp goblin archetype, and enlist it to support your goal. Or you can go any other way of coming up with a critter that will help do what you want it to do... What you do NOT want is to figure out what it does when it's not tending the swamps... You do not want to think about who its friends are, if it prefers DOTA2 or LOL, if it has a tragic backstory, etc. To do so would be both potentially unethical AND magically counterproductive.

Memetically seeding servitors is a valid technique, as it lets them gather power from a wider source, and potentially grow beyond you alone; but this is already the realm of egregoric hacking, and I think one should consider it a high-risk high-responsibility approach.

And finally, working with more complex, potentially intelligent or superintelligent entities, whether thoughtforms you "create" (tap into), or demons you summon, requires a whole different set of practices and general ritual hygiene. You don't just willy nilly summon King Paimon and then act as if he was a character in your slash fiction; that sort of thing tends to Not End Well.