What Are Servitors & Magical Thought Forms

Let’s talk about servitors or thought forms. 

Today’s discussion will be about servitors or thought forms generally. What they are, what you can expect, etc.

Servitors are energetic thought forms that you, the magician or the witch, would create in order to go out and perform certain tasks for you.

What they can do for you is really limited to your imagination.

You can bring back information, you can bring back knowledge, you can spy on people, you can attract more customers and bring in more money, if you’re having problems with clients who aren’t paying then you can create a servitor for that purpose. You can create them for protection, you can create them for healing. The amount of things you can do with servitors is actually endless.  It all depends on your needs and your requirements and what you want to do with the servitor.

Now, there are a variety of different thought forms. The general one spoken about, that being the Servitor, is usually found within Chaos Magick.

In Kabbalistic practice it’s usually called an Artificial Elemental, and in this practice you generally only work with the Elements. In Kabbalah those Elements are usually Air, Fire and Water. In other traditions and paths you may use all four which would be Air, Fire, Water and Earth. There are some differences in variations between paths and practices themselves.

You also get egregores. In broad terms, an egregore could be likened to a God or Goddess. In many regards they are. If you look at the Christian God for instance, this God is an egregore.

In fact you may find that in a lot of cases, when working with a spirit, that spirit is quite often an egregore.

An egregore is very similar to a servitor, in that it is an energetic being that has been created by a magician or a witch, a person. That servitor was sent out to do a particular thing or perform a particular task and therefore, it has certain aspects tied to it. As an example a servitor that is created to bring in money would have aspects of wealth, prosperity and abundance, or a love related servitor would encompass such things as love, sex, desire, lust, romance.

As that servitor grows, it becomes stronger. If it is then used by multiple people, it is then fed more energy and grows exponentially. It is this group energy that causes the servitor to grow even more, and it can gain sentience and it is then that the servitor becomes an egregore. This means that it will feed off the group, and the group can tap into its energy to achieve their goals for those aspects that egregore is assigned to. The bigger the group, the more powerful it becomes and then the magick becomes easier.

You can imagine an egregore as a cloud that hovers over a group of people. As the people in the group feed it more energy, it grows bigger. As the group grows, so does the cloud, and those people can tap into the knowledge and power that the cloud or egregore holds.

There is always a give and take. You can take the information, knowledge and power, but you also have to give back energy which allows the egregore to grow and also survive.

Now, I’m not saying that all Gods and Goddesses are egregores. You do have the original energies, the original powers, but in a lot of cases those original powers may have been introduced into a certain society which has changed them into something different.

As an example, let’s say a deity is introduced into a small village. The people in that village start worshipping that deity and over time, over generations, over centuries, you might find that the intention gets morphed a bit. Then, from the original energy that was the God or Goddess, it’s become something a little bit different and that can become an egregore. I do however believe that even when we morph the energy of a deity into an egregore which is not that deity specifically, more kind of like a carbon copy that has been altered slightly, it still connects to that original energy that was and is the deity.

Now, if you are working with the original energy of the deity or an egregore doesn’t actually matter. You will still get the results you require, and that is what counts. In fact it is probably easier to work with the egregore as the energy isn’t as strong, which can quite often knock you off your feet.

I do want to have a look at the group mind briefly, as it is a very very powerful thing and is sometimes called the mob mind.

Imagine a situation where there’s a large group of people in one area. One person all of a sudden has a gripe with somebody else and that person starts screaming and shouting. Then another person joins in because they have the same problem with this somebody. It may not be a somebody, it may be a political issue, but whatever it is, more and more people who share the same viewpoint start to rally together and the group starts to grow. The energy starts moving from that one person towards all the other people, and all of a sudden you’ve got this mass of people that are all connected to a group mind or a mob mind. This is not exactly like an egregore, but if you were to actually see the energy you’d probably find that cloud forms over the top of this group or mob. However, once that group then disperses and people start disconnecting from that energy of the group mind then things start to calm down and everything goes back to normal. Quite often some of the people that were part of that mob mind will wonder why they got involved to begin with. They simply get taken up by the passing energy and get hooked into it.

So, it is very similar to what we’re talking about with an egregore, however a mob mind is short lived, whereas an egregore will have a much longer lifespan, often over centuries.

The egregore is a very interesting topic but it’s not quite what we are going to talk about today.

I’m going to be focusing specifically on servitors which can help you with your life. As I said, you can do anything with them, whether it be bringing in money, bringing in love, finding sex, helping your spiritual journey, bringing in more knowledge, protection. It can be many, many, many things, whatever you actually need and desire.

So, a servitor is an energetic being that you create to go out and perform a task, whatever you need. 

A lot of people will say that you are to command the servitor. In terms of this we have to look into any kind of spiritual or magical work where we are working with entities, whether it’s an energetic being that you are creating or if it’s an angel or a demon, but specifically in the area of demons where you get the evocation workings in regards to the Goetia and the other Solomonic Grimoires that were written a couple or a few centuries ago.

The problem is that those Grimoires were based very much on Christian concepts and within Ceremonial Magick. You will find that you are instructed to command, trap, bind and threaten the Spirits. However, if you do that, the Spirits aren’t going to be very kind to you if they get loose, just like a person would retaliate if you did the same thing to them. When someone has learned these methods, they tend to often allow that behaviour to spill over into their servitor workings.

In many ways such a person may develop a bit of a “god complex”. Because of that they feel like they are supposed to command the servitor, but this work is like creating a child and this child needs you. You have created a baby which came from you. This child is not something that you just get to push around and beat on whenever you feel like it because you are its “Master”. You’ve made this entity, this energetic being. You’ve created it, and it becomes your child. You’ve got to view it the same way.

In Abarat by Clive Barker, there is actually a scenario where one of the characters has created an entity to do it’s work around the house.  However, this character beats it up, pushes it around, and puts it into a cage when it’s not working, generally treats it like an animal, worse than an animal, you shouldn’t even treat animals like that. Eventually it get’s a foothold and it gets out of the cage, and because of all the pain it has been put through, it retaliates and it destroys the person, the owner, the “master”. Even if you look into BDSM where you have a Master/slave relationship, the Master isn’t there to unnecessarily abuse the slave. 

The Master will encourage and care for, help to bring out aspects in the slave that the slave is too scared to actually bring out themselves. In the case of the servitor, this is your baby, this is your creation. You’ve got to treat it the way that you would if it was a physical being.

Anyhow, I just want you to keep that in mind because I remember in the past I saw a lot of books written about servitors and commanding and binding and caging and I don’t know how people can do that, but anyway.

We should also talk about the artificial anthropoid.

You may have heard of the golem. Not however Golem from Lord of the Rings.

A golem is mostly found in the Kabbalistic Hebrew texts that has a physical body that has been given life, usually created for protection, by a Rabbi.

Probably the most famous of these is the Golem of Prague. Fascinating story.

But the golem has a physical body, usually made of clay, that the Rabbi would perform certain rituals upon which then brings the clay body to life. There is a particular Hebrew text written on its forehead which means life, and when you wipe one letter out, it changes the word to death and the golem then dies.

So, that’s just a brief look at the servitor which ties in nicely with Chaos Magick, but also with sigil magick which I spoke about previously. With the servitor you create a sigil, and from that sigil you then create a name and even a chant that can be used when creating the servitor. 

Following this I will discuss how to create a servitor from the Chaos Magick perspective and then following that, an Artificial Elemental from the Kabbalistic point of view.

The servitor is a very broad topic, so if you have any questions over the course of this discussion over the next few weeks, please leave a comment below in the blog post, or a voice message on Anchor if you are listening to the podcast.