The Master Works of Chaos Magick: Practical Techniques For Directing Your Reality - Adam Blackthorne 2016

Thoughtforms and The Other People

Before we ask for the help of spirits (which works whether you believe in them or not), let me show you two aspects of magick that made me cringe with embarrassment when I first tried them. They work so easily that they can’t be ignored.

When I was in my teens, me and my friends found a mail-order publisher of occult books, and we worshipped it. So much potential! The adverts for those books were wild and over the top, and we’d save up our pocket money and send off for the books. We’d wait a week or so, and the books would arrive looking kind of cheap and creepy, but they also looked like they might actually contain some real magick. We’d order books, one after the other, and wait impatiently, hoping there’d be something we could use. We were often disappointed, because the magick turned out to be too serious or too vague or, worst of all, too silly.

There was one book about thoughtforms; it was left in my care and I lost it decades ago, and can’t even remember the name of the author. But, the essence of that book was that you made up some imaginary friends, and so long as you talked to them as though they were real, they could do magick for you. I was enraged. That seemed so dumb I wanted to tear the book up. That may be what actually happened, because I have a pretty all-encompassing room full of occult material, and that book is nowhere to be found. Never mind.

I rejected the ideas wholly and moved on to a wiccan ritual with an onion. It didn’t work. But at least I wasn’t playing with imaginary friends.

A couple of years later, working with Chaos Magick, I chose to develop a few servitors. To create a servitor, you invent a spirit that is bound to you, and it does magick for you when asked. You treat the servitor as though it’s real. You birth it with some sort of occult energy and ceremony. Cool. But here’s an alternative: thoughtforms. And yes, although it sounds daft, they are a bit like imaginary friends that you talk to so often that they become real. I wouldn’t put you through this if it didn’t work, so bear with me.

Thoughtforms work most reliably when they are used on your own flaws and shortcoming (or skills and strengths), and when they’re used to influence the feelings and thoughts of others.

A thoughtform does not need a ritual, sigil, or physical place to reside, or anything else that goes into crafting a servitor. It only needs repetition. If you invent a creature and imagine that it is there often enough, it’s there. There are many hardcore occultists who laugh their pants off at this. Unless you’re commanding demons, you’re just not tough enough! The funny thing is, it takes great bravery to pretend that there’s something there when there isn’t. This is the magick of real courage, because you risk feeling like an idiot; when you first get into this you might wonder whether you’ve lost your grip on sanity. When you actually sense the thoughtform, or see it, it can be just as staggering as a full demonic evocation. That’s why I don’t call this silly anymore. If you have the knack for it, this is heady magick.

I’ve rambled on for a bit because the actual technique is only a couple of sentences long: you pretend something is real, and imagine it’s there. Eventually it is there, and then it can do stuff for you.

You might imagine a glowing ball of light, or a horned alien, or something angelic, or a magickal cat, or a wispy mist. You might give it a name. You might give it a face, a personality, a particular set of powers. There are no rules. You just keep your attention on it, with these thoughts in mind. One day, you sense that it has consciousness, and off you go. You just speak to it, and tell it what you want to happen.

I used to be nervous around girls in my early teens, so I made a thoughtform that would make me relax when I was near them. I imagined a blue-skinned man, walking by my side, on the left. I knew that he made me calm. I kept it simple. He didn’t make me interesting, or good at flirting — just calm. That was all I wanted. I’d imagine him there any time it occurred to me, which was hundreds of times a day. If I turned my head to the left and looked for him, I’d see him. All in my imagination… until it wasn’t. Until I could think of him and catch a glimpse of him, more alive than imagination could ever make him. And then I asked him to walk with me, make me calm. And he did.

Make something up, pay attention to it, and then ask it to do what you want.

If your thoughtform ever feels a bit too alive or rebellious, or like it’s not doing what you want, you can imagine it being killed, torn apart, dissolved, or melted. Your imagination rules, so you win these battles.

It sounds easy, and it is, but it does take a fair bit of effort to keep believing in something you know isn’t real. It can take weeks before you ever get to ask for magick, and your head can get pretty cluttered. Build fifteen thoughtforms, and you find they pop up when you’re trying to do other magick. It’s distracting, so keep it under control.

Another form of magick that enraged me was anything involving an effigy or doll. The idea of making effigies in wax, clay or anything else was childish, and because I’d seen it in horror movies it felt more like fantasy that reality. Until I tried it.

You create an effigy out of anything you like, and act as though it’s the person you want to affect. You don’t pretend it’s like the person or connected to the person, you act as though it is the person. You talk to it. You feel toward it, the way you do toward the person. You have the same mannerisms when you’re around it. This might take a few minutes or a few days, but when the effigy starts to feel real, you do the magick — and that happens like this. You build your feelings toward the effigy (which are identical to the feelings you have for the actual person), and then as you stroke, mangle or otherwise affect the clay figure, you change your feelings. If you want to shut the mouth of the doll, you literally shut it, and feel enormous satisfaction that the person’s mouth is shut. Whether you sew, squash or just squeeze the lip together, this works. Use your imagination and you can have an enormous effect on people with this magick. Even if it seems silly. You can do obvious harm to your effigies, but you can also bind them up, freeze them, wrap them up together, or put ideas (on little scrolls of paper) right into their heads. Lots of places you can go.

Don’t let yourself end up with a cupboard full of effigies. When your magick has worked, look at the effigy as a stranger would. It’s not the person you believe it to be; it’s clay and cloth and wire and feathers. Look at it like a scientist would. Take it apart with the same lack of feeling that you would have taking apart a broken toy, and then throw it away.

There’s another way to get this to work, which is to create a single effigy that you think of as a powerful magickal being. Take at least a month to build your little person, and know that as you do so, it is coming to life. Yes, this should feel a bit creepy; this magick gives me the shivers. I don’t know why making a tiny clay person should feel like you’re giving birth to a real lifeform, but this happens. You build your magickal person slowly, adding new bits. Keep it hidden away, at the back of a drawer, or behind a box. Make it feel like something naughty or secret. Visit it each day and add something new — maybe just another blob of clay, or a bit of gravel for texture. Feed it magickal energy. When it feels like it’s almost alive, give it eyes. Even if you just stick a couple of old buttons on the face, those eyes will look lively. When it feels like it might have consciousness, you can do some magick.

Do not ask the effigy to do anything, just give it a sense of life and then tell it a story. Tell it your problem, and how you want to feel. Don’t tell it how to solve your problem, just tell it the problem and how you want to feel when this is all over. It will do the work.

Remember when you used to tell your Grandma a story about how you were short of pocket money, and how much you’d like to buy that new Star Wars toy, and Grandma would magickally solve the problem for you? She wouldn’t hand you the cash there and then, but she’d make sure you got the cash. The same is true of your little effigy. Tell it a story and it will listen and work to solve your problem.

Who the hell is doing the magick here? Is it your will, your imagination, another lifeform, or does the effigy call on other spirits? This isn’t a theory book so we won’t go into that, but I will say that even though this sounds like the most ludicrous part of the book, it’s really worth working with. But you need an active imagination. If you’re the sort of person that walks past a graveyard and starts imagining all sort of strange feelings, or if you go into a house and sense things that aren’t obviously there, this is going to work beautifully. If you can be playful and childlike and commit to this magick, no matter how daft it seems, it will shock you. It may also fail utterly… but, that’s magick. Most of the time, it tends to work. Sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s how you find the magick you want to work with for the rest of your life.

If you like your effigy, keep it hidden and you can use it indefinitely. If you don’t like it, pull it apart and drop it in a bucket of water. This can be unpleasant — I can’t lie about that. You just have to get it done, pour the remains away and tell yourself that it was just a toy and that it’s gone.

No book on Chaos Magick would be complete without a chapter on Servitors. OK, sorry, this book is incomplete. Damon Brand wrote Magickal Servitors, and I couldn’t add anything to that. I gave you a chapter on thoughtforms and The Other People instead. Most Chaos Magick books don’t give you that, so can we call it even? Thanks. (And there’s a bit later on that shows you how to turn a thoughtform into a ceremonial spirit, so that’s cool.)