Liber Azag: Book of Sigils, part 4

Servitors

It's time to speak about servitors and their use in Sigil Magick. A word servitor was originally intended to mean any kind of entity, from an elemental being to a demon. Modern definition is an artificial entity created by the practitioner, but I personally prefer the original meaning so I will use it more broadly in this book. One of the reasons is that Sigil Magick would be too limited if you didn't know how to apply its philosophy to modern and traditional systems of Magick, Spare's original intention was to re-discover Magick in its purest state, not to create an independent system that's not compatible with the rest.

So, what is a servitor? Servitor is a type of non-physical lifeform with some level of consciousness and intelligence. The biggest difference between a servitor and a sigil is the working mechanics. By using a sigil, we can shift a probability to our advantage, but if the gate is closed, our desire won't be fulfilled. A servitor that is given a task makes conscious decisions to meet its goal and when there is no apparent gate to the goal, it can learn about how to climb the wall or lockpick the door. In other words a servitor can learn new things to meet its goals. Servitors are also suitable for more complex tasks where a couple of factors have to be manipulated or when we search for something, servitors are e.g.  good finders of rare occult books.

Before we speak about how to create our own servitors, let's take a look into those already existing, there is a good number of grimoires consisting of countless spirits ready for our use. Grimoires are like phone book, you get a spirit's name, seal, correspondences and descriptions of its abilities including means of summoning these. It is great to have a set of entities one can work with, just remember that most of these are egregores, entities created by a great deal of practitioners and worshippers during the ages and their consciousness is usually culturally specific. For example when an entity was crafted by a blood cult, it will require you to sacrifice blood as an offering or if the spirit is specific to some hidden tradition, it will require you to be initiate of that same tradition. I say this because many egregores come from Goetia where it is normal to threaten the spirit with God's wrath to comply, and some of these spirits really need this behavior to work. On the other side some of the Goetic spirits are deities from much older religions and treating them like God's servants will bring some unfortunate consequences, if the egregore was created while being worshipped as a god, you shouldn't threaten it like a hobo wanting some spare change, enough said.

So, we know there are some pre-made servitors, but where? You can pick from Goetia, Clavicula Solomonis, Faust's grimoire, Grimorium Verum, New Avatar Power, Simon's Necronomicon and many many more. I personally prefer Necronomicon but I worked with others before. You can off course follow rituals and procedures as described in these grimoires (Necronomicon's spellbook, second book of Necronomicon, has a pretty nice and straightforward ritual) or you can take Spare's approach and use gnostic practices to contact the spirits, death postures used over the seals is an especially effective method of conjuring the entity). You can also try to put a seal of an entity under the black mirror, think about the seal while performing the death posture and on the verge of excitatory gnosis look into the mirror.

When speaking about conjuration, we should also mention the most amazing way of doing so with Sigil Magick, meeting spirits in dreams. As easy as sigilizing I WANT TO MEET A SUCCUBUS IN MY DREAM and charging it. By the way, the dream state spirit work is the only one where you want to use beginnings of the desire like THIS MY WILL, I WISH or I WANT TO. Reason is that servitors have their own consciousness and intelligence and you rather request them to come than commanding them. You also want to avoid this to be permanent, who would want to meet succubi in each of his dreams and always wake up tired? Just few hints, before working with spirits in your dreams you should practice a dream recollection first. Simply repeat I REMEMBER ALL MY DREAMS as a mantra till you fall asleep or sigilize it and use the sigil before going to sleep, a charged sigil can also hang on the wall just above your bed to increase its effects. Speaking of working with entities, you can sigilize the I WANT TO MEET THE SPIRIT IN MY DREAM in a fashion of a circle, then you just put the seal or sigilized name of the spirit inside the circle and charge it. This way you save time and also each of your dream evocations will be more and more successful.You can do the same with remembering all your dreams and make it as the outer circle for the dream spirit work. So, in the end you will have a seal of a spirit enclosed in a circle saying you want to meet that spirit in a dream and that will be enclosed in another circle stating you remember all your dreams. These circular, rectangular or triangular hollow sigils are used  by practitioners quite frequently, they just don't speak much about it. But we can of course find these in traditional magick as well, magick circles and triangles of evocation are hollow sigils. Same goes to planetary intelligences, if we have e.g. a mercurial spirit, we will enclose its seal within an octagon, because 8 is a number of Mercury in Chaldean sequence (more about it in Astro Magick Essentials).

While still speaking about pre-made servitors it is also worth to mention something. A servitor doesn't need to be only invoked or evoked, the biggest beauty of servitors is their multi-functional use. Let's say you pick some entity from a grimoire that has some ability or knowledge that you want. We have already spoken about Goetia so let's use some goetic entity as an example, let's speak about Marbas. Marbas is a expert in healing and mechanical arts. A healing, meaning an ability to heal others and improve's one own health dramatically, that is useful skill. Mechanical arts doesn't mean only small geared machines, it's general for household work, when you need to fix anything from a clogged toilet up to the electricity problems, Marbas is the entity for that. Now tell me, what handy man would refuse such a gift, an ability to fix nearly anything and an unique mentality of solving problems that only Marbas can give to you? Everything without a need to even evoke this entity. How? If we read Goetia, we will find out that each antity has a name, a seal, description and correspondences. These all are sigils. All we have to do is to draw Marbas' sigil on the paper and use it regularly for focal meditation to suck in his characteristics. Of course death postures with intention to do so will have the same effect. We can also strap his seal to a piece of thread and use it as a talisman or amulet of sorts. Now comes the beautiful part, we can be really creative, take a piece of wood or metal, engrave his seal on it charge it and use that as your talisman, or use his seal as a latte art, charge it and then drink it. Or go old school, charge his sigil on a piece of soft paper, charge it, then let the paper dissolve in water or tea and then drink it. There is really no limit stating how you can or cannot work with servitors and their sigils. You can also draw Marbas' seal on your body with a pen, best directly on the wounded area or on the chest right in front of the heart and use this as a centering and magnifying gateway for your healing, or draw it on the body of the sick person you wish to heal.

To create your own servitor you have to specify his goals first. Should the servitor be a one-time type for a specific task or should he be the multi-use type? In case of one-timers you have to specify an expiration for the servitor, whether when the task is finished or in some reasonable time frame. Let's make an example of a servitor now. Let's say I want my servitor to aid me in meditations, clarity of mind and ability to make correct decisions. What shape could be the best for such a purpose? The servitor can be short as there is no need for him to rush anywhere, he should have long white beard representing wisdom and mystery. He should have a scroll or parchment, representing wisdom and knowledge, also some form of pen or feather, representing writing notes and writing definite decisions. We can use parchment for the written notes and scroll for a gained knowledge, scroll should probably be on his back to make it ready for use, parchment and feather should be in his hands. When the purpose and ideal form of the servitor is decided, we should take some time visualizing the servitor and our communication with him/her to make sure this combination is really what we want. Remember that when we do a mistake now, our servitor will be less able to accomplish his future tasks.

Next we should create the name and activation formula for our servitor. Let's use his set of abilities as a desire statement:

MEDITATION INSIGHT DECISION MAKING CLARITY

Let's erase all vowels and repeating letters now:

MDTNSGHCKLR

Turn it into a sigil mantra:

MADATAN SIGI HOCEK LIER

Now we can either turn his mantra into a word of power to gain his name or we can use the original desire statement for this. From mantra it would be MASIHOLI and from the statement MEINDEMA. I personally like MEINDEMA more.

As the next part we should create a seal of our entity to have some nice focal point for meditations. We can either sigilize the name, mantra or the desire statement, choose what you like. We can also use any method of sigilization we like. Frankly, our MEINDEMA possesses a lot of Mercurial qualities, so let's use the square of Mercury to create his seal.

Once we have the description, form, name, mantra and seal, we are pretty much ready to create our very first servitor, easiest way to do so is to use his seal for focal meditation while vibrating his name and his mantra. Coincidentally this is also the method we will use on regular basis to feed our servitor. And, because our servitor is meditation based, this process will also automatically become easier for us as the time goes and our artifical spirit grows in power, everything depends on the practice. It is also a good experience to visualize the form of your servitor and repeat his name a couple of times when falling asleep. This way you can call your servitor into your dreams and get to know your creation. Servitors also like to lurk around a lot, so if you share a bed with your partner, it can happen that the very next day your fiance will describe a very strangely looking creature from his/her dreams that will be suspiciously similar to your servitor. This happened to me the very day I have created my very first servitor, a fox-like creature named Erlis, the morning after that my wife has told me about her dream where I was sleeping while leaning back on a tree and a weirdly looking "dog" was protecting me against something. She described the "dog" exactly the way I built Erlis to the closest detail and she didn't even know about my little experiment with servitor creation.

It can happen that your servitor creation won't work the way you would expect and the spirit will be too weak or too vague to even communicate. Sometimes this happens. The very usual reason is that our unconsciousness didn't join the separate pieces like name, mantra and seal together, so they exist separately, but do not enhance each other. In fact it can even happen that these separate pieces will negate each other. This situation tends to be very troublesome, often even annoying. Fortunately there is a quite quick and easy fix for that. Write servitor's name and mantra on separate pieces of paper, draw his seal on another piece of paper and you can also draw your servitor's form on yet another piece of paper. Once you did that put all pieces together and secure them with a piece of thread. Once that is finished, simply burn them together. Occult lodges usually use this method to associate your real name with your name given to you by the lodge. The basic belief is that this way your name and your lodge name does merge together on astral level, as you can see the very same thing can be done as a quick fix in case of servitor creation. What also helps is to visualise your servitor right next to you during the day, imagine that your servitors are always with you, all the time, they are sitting right next to you in bus, they are attending the same meetings as you are, they are walking right by your side, etc. And when you are already visualising that, remember to talk to them in your thoughts. This helps to develop a relationship with your creation. Sometimes when you are communicating with your servitors, they will talk back to you. People tend to role-play a bit in this case so they are just chatting with themselves thinking they speak with their own creation, but once your creation really talks to you, you will be able to easily differentiate that from your internal voice. Servitors also tend to develop a sort of personality unique to them. This personality will also affect your visualisations and your inner talks with them. Their personality will also affect the way they do things, they will develop a very specific personal style of their own. This style will have some resemblance to your own, after all you play a creator in this process, and the same way as your servitor is affecting your thoughts about him, same way you are affecting your servitor's personality. This is also one of the reasons why some egregores are hard to work with, there is a big cultural gap between you and their "creators". This gap makes it a bit hard to decide, you either have to work with old and powerful entity but with cultural problems, or make your own entity that will be easier for you to work with, but results will be harder to achieve due to the age and inexperience of the servitor.

So far we have described only permanent servitors, but what about those limited by time or by task accomplishment? This information can be part of the desire statement, simply adding ONE WEEK, ONE MONTH or TILL something IS ACCOMPLISHED should do the trick. There is only one problem with this scenario, the time needed for the task won't fit the expiration date of the servitor or if the servitor becomes too intelligent, he will figure out not doing the task will prolong his existence. But there is a simple solution to the problem, create a permanent servitor for a specific task and when the task is finished, simply dissolve the servitor. Easiest way to do this is the burning method described before, simply write servitor's name, mantra and draw the seal all on one piece of paper and your name on another piece. Tie these two pieces together and burn them,  merging the servitor back into yourself. The very same thing can be done with various other methods, including a ritual to draw all already created servitors back, we will speak about these methods later, for now it is important that you know the basics of servitor creation, manipulation and dissolving.