Servitors. Created entities. A signature work of your chaos magician; designing, building, giving LIFE that will carry out your will. Sounds great doesn’t it? Until you find you’ve created a monster. Ever read Frankenstein?

In case you haven’t, it tells how the young Victor F gives up on the magics of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albert the Great because he can’t get them to work summoning spirits and everybody mocks him. Turning to the physical sciences instead, he makes a human body and zaps life into it. He doesn’t like what he gets, runs away screaming, and when he summons up (ahem) the nerve to return, his creation is gone.

His creature somehow manages to educate itself and plan an elaborate revenge on its maker, despite having had no upbringing and no prior experience to tell it what all these concepts mean or why to even bother learning to read. It’s a cultural void, an AI with no input. It’s even less functional than Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, famously taught racism on Twitter, which at least got some editorial input. And it’s as scary as Android Dick, which reckoned that it would look after its squishy friends in a people zoo. These are examples of socialization gone wrong because nobody took into sufficient account that an intelligence is not built, it’s grown. It needs to develop within a cultural context which provides everything from the basic understanding of ‘pointing at something means I want you to pay attention to it’ to shared values and, crucially, norms of behaviour.

These shared values and norms matter. It’s all very well for some radical -sounding magician to say they’re freeing themselves from the constraints of social norms (presumably to turn into some sort of powerful sociopath), but these things run deep and they are essential to basic interpersonal communication as well as stopping us being locked up, killed or run out of town for doing something awful.

Speaking of which, Victor’s creature does exactly that. There’s the story.

And there’s a difference between a simple machine and an artificial intelligence. I have never noticed a problem with fairly simple task-based servitors with the IQ of a beetle, but what about your more sophisticated entities?

Egregores can create problems. For those unfamiliar with the term, we sometimes use it to talk of entities that are basically the Gestalt consciousness and intent of a group. I recall one magical group complaining that they had ritually created an egregore for the group, but it had started misbehaving on them. Luckily I’d read Frankenstein and seen Red Dwarf: Legion and correctly surmised that: 1) one of the group had contributed an unhelpful influence on the egregore and also that 2) they had erred in programming it with logically absurd presuppositions. Now humans have a natural Fudge Factor for dealing with contradictory facts. We fudge, ignore, deny, whatever threatens to fry our circuits. Not so the thoughtlessly created intelligence. With no programmed coping strategies for dealing with the impossible, the egregore went insane and ran amok.

First, clearing up the mess. Then back to the drawing board. Oh dear.

I spoke on these issues with the magician George Jackson in Portland, Oregon some years ago, as he had been instrumental in creating an egregore for the extensive magical group to which he belonged at the time. We agreed that when creating an egregore we have a responsibility to the whole group and to the entity to control who belongs to the group to contribute to the egregore, and to control what it learns. For our own sakes, we don’t need a bonkers AI churning up our rituals. And to be fair, the AI doesn’t need a bonkers AI. George and I concluded that for such sophisticated entities, socialization and- well, almost parenting, is a must. Think of babies learning, not machines being programmed.

There’s no need to get totally alien-first-contact about it: if Sumerian demons and medieval grimoire spirits can understand you in your language, anything can. Any entity’s communication with you is going to be through your own symbol set. Experience has taught me that a Goetic demon understands exactly what you mean when you point at it.

So let’s look at a few means of constructing servitors responsibly. Our interactions with servitors come under the chaos magic heading of Evocation, so let’s summarise that first.

Occasions of Evocation presuppose that we can experience a presence:



a ‘self’ like unto our own sense of self

but also different and separate from our own self

with which we can communicate.



Spirit model magic is far and away the most useable kind of magic here. You can use energy model Evocations: Taoist magic is full of such, often involving mixing elemental streams of energy in the imagination via bodily movement and breathing techniques, imprinted with appropriate symbols (read: sigils). Despite these techniques, though, you don’t in my experience get the same precision in tasking that you get by speaking to the servitor.

You can use psychological model Evocation, but it usually has the typical psych model disadvantage of presupposing that whatever happens is all ‘in your head.’ This leaves little room for effects in the observable world, aside from your own changes of behaviour (the best use of psych model magics). Spirit model magic presupposes that there is Something Out There, and prepares you for Out There effects.

Once you accept the premise that There Is Something Out There, you’ll find that you can’t just make demands and have your wishes fulfilled by courier because there is no Cosmic Ordering Service. Whatever the Something Out There is, It isn’t a smegging vending machine. You have to negotiate with it, and enabling negotiation is the primary virtue of spirit model magics. You negotiate with spirits. Treat them like people, with their own agendas and needs, their own quirks and customs.

So back to creating such a spirit, if you feel you really need to (do ask yourself the question: what am I doing this for?).

Starting from the beginning with a complex servitor, you might want to program some basic presuppositions. I developed these protocols. I think of these as upgrades to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. They are intended to protect the magician from outside interference in the created presence and from unwanted results and to keep the servitor from deviating from or outgrowing its purpose or from going insane:

The Servitor has a Statement of Intent. It has a material base. If the base were destroyed, so would the Servitor be. Whatever its Statement of Intent, its higher intention is only the well-being of its creator and nominated others (optional for short-lived servitors). It communicates as a spirit with face and voice and answering to its name. It responds to and takes input from its creator and nominated others only. It is content to do only what is asked, and to rest otherwise. It has a life span measured in time or by the completion of the task (for short term servitors). It is resourced with the ability to adapt and learn.

At some point a complex servitor is better regarded as an egregore or deity, A god has no Statement of Intent, only attributes and particular concerns, and just as deities can grow in function and influence, as Wotan, a European storm god, gradually became Odhinn the All-Father, sometimes mission creep may give a servitor so many more additional attributes, scope and autonomy that it becomes indistinguishable from a deity.

In this case the protocols should be modified. It’s advisable to keep points 3 and 8 at all costs. Be careful about loosening the point 1 Statement of Intent: a servitor has a narrow scope, usually defined by its Statement of Intent. Wider scope characterizes deity. It becomes autonomous inasmuch as its purposes may not be your purposes at all, and you will have to work around it, not vice versa. We may keep simple servitors as pets, but gods will not be kept thus. If your AI servitor comes of age, you will probably have to let it go. Or you become an AI zookeeper. That would be an Android Dick move. Pete Carroll’s notion of a Chaos Cyberzoo sounds very radically magical, but you have to keep control of creatures that will increasingly struggle with you. Did you really want that? This is spirit model magic: treat the presence as a person, not as a slave.

So where were we? Right, design. Choose the scope of your entity carefully, and incorporate the appropriate presuppositions. Resource your entity, representing the resources in your imagination, and, if possible, symbolically on a material base.

Typical resources include:

means of knowing– eyes perhaps, to symbolise its powers of perception.

means of communicating – mouth perhaps, that it may speak to you.

means of going – in ancient iconography, beings which could travel in ‘spiritual’ ‘higher’ or ‘astral’ realms were often pictured with wings.

means of doing — hands, claws, weapons, tools, powers appropriate to function. Ever wonder why Hindu gods have so many arms?

means of adapting – a degree of intelligence, power to mutate or learn.

means of sustaining — an energy-based servitor needs energy input, spirits mostly need attention. In both cases these resources can be symbolised as food, incense or other offerings.

The essential feature of creating any entity is attention. Even in energy models, it is a truism that where the attention goes the energy goes. In spirit models we create in the same way as we evoke a pre-existent presence: by direct address, which in its non-verbal form amounts to no more than attention.

SERVITOR LAUNCHING.

I use two main forms. Hard launch is the ritual with which chaos magicians are so familiar, the sort of thing described by Phil Hine in his classic account.

Soft launch is where you don’t really do a ritual, but you may keep the material base close by and keep attending to it. Sleeping with your new magical tool under your pillow or carrying it around all day would be a common example. Or simply make your material base — idol, ritual tool, talisman, whatever — and get using.

For your amusement, here’s an account from the apocryphal Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. The Bible seems an unlikely source for information on making such entities, but here in the Book of Wisdom the author gives complete instructions. As one who disbelieved in gods and idols, he was writing a parody of contemporary pagan practice, unaware that all that is needed to make it work is a magical model that makes the process meaningful to the operator. Whoops.

“A skilled woodcutter may saw down a tree easy to handle,And skilfully strip off all its bark,And then with pleasing workmanship

Make a useful vessel that serves life’s needs,

And burns the cast-off pieces of his work

To prepare his food and eat his fill.

But a cast-off piece from among them, useful for nothing,

A stick crooked and full of knots,

He takes and carves with care in his leisure,

And shapes it with skill gained in idleness;

He forms it in the likeness of a human being,

Or makes it like some worthless animal,

Giving it a coat of red paint and colouring its surface red

And covering every blemish in it with paint;

Then he makes a suitable niche for it,

And sets it in the wall, and fastens it there with iron…

…When he prays about possessions and his marriage and children,

He is not ashamed to address a lifeless thing…”

(The Book of Wisdom 13:11-16, New Revised Standard Version)

Makes you want to grab a piece of driftwood and have a go, doesn’t it? Get your material base, put it somewhere you’ll keep seeing it, and talk to it, touch it whenever you go past, give it little jobs to do, and — importantly — whenever something requested of any servitor comes to pass, give the servitor credit without any of that “could it have happened anyway?” nonsense. Results alone count, yes? You asked, you got, you say thank you nicely.

Treat them like people.

This article is dedicated to the memory of George Jackson. Blessings Dark and Bright, my friend.

picture credit: zombis-cannibal at DeviantArt