Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current - Andrieh Vitimus 2009
Advanced Practicum on Entity Creation
There are probably hundreds of thousands more ways to create an entity than what we have covered. In this chapter of the book, we will cover more advanced servitor and entity topics. If this chapter does not make sense right away, try to create a few servitors and see if that changes your perception. This chapter represents more of a variety of different ideas regarding entity creation, splicing, and combination to give you, the advanced reader, some ideas for further experimentation in the adventure.
Praise and Feeding
In the previous chapter, it was implied that servitors (even viral ones) will use or attach themselves to energy to achieve a result, even if it is the mental energy within a person. Short-term, one-time creations more or less use the oomph from the creation process. However, long-term servitors seem to act more and more like external entities, except that ideally they should only have your interests at heart.
To get continued results, the servitor will need to be continually fed like an external entity. Often, just strongly acknowledging the servitor in an earnest and compelling fashion will achieve this. When my parking servitor gets me rock-star parking, I will lavish thanks and praise on the parking servitor, even going so far as to say, "Mr. Parking Servitor, you da man" over and over, while visualizing the sigil and pushing energy into the servitor. In fact, this idea of feeding after results is a useful technique for any familiar, spirit, or creation.
If a servitor consistently gets results, it should be retained. Servitors tied to a physical base can take strength from that base, which serves as a de facto link between you and the creation. We already learned how to send energy down a link. In some religions, the physical base is the spirit or creation, but this explanation is quite misleading for practicing occultists. Artificially, if the servitor is getting results, we can pump up its strength by feeding and pushing energy down the link of the base (or into the base, if you prefer). Pushing the same combination of energy that was used in the creation process into the servitor is a very desirable goal. Before you repeat the creation ritual for the servitor (which you could do), remember that if you can remember the creation ritual while in a trance state, you can achieve the same state of mind of that memory and project that energy outward just like we were doing earlier. It is always a good idea to feed your creations after achieving results. This is standard positive reinforcement. Results equal food for the servitor.
If you want to experiment, you can try to feed the servitor different energy from what you gave your creation initially. Doing this will slightly alter the entity and its general demeanor over time, because the informational content of the servitor will change. If you try this, which I hope you will, you might realize that it shifts toward the informational patterns you feed it. This same idea holds true for familiartype entities you run across (and work with), a good percentage of the dead (if you work with them), and almost any spirit that has a one-toone relationship with you. Likewise, as suggested earlier, if you break off part of yourself and consistently feed that part different types of energy, you can alter that part of yourself and shift the information pattern in that part. For example, one technique I have done is to iso late and break off a part of myself that has tremendous fear and then evoke that part just to feed it lots of love and safety energy. It really works.
Evocation Is Often Enough
A lot of the processes I outlined to create servitors, while useful exercises, can be a bit tedious. If you have developed a general state of mind, have learned the methods to generate that state of mind, have given the entity a name and/or sigil, and have linked in a form, smell, sound, etc., for the entity, before you start the process, your subconscious mind can (and will) bind together the energy and information, and form the details into a cohesive whole entity.
Simply performing the one evocation (adding your own details to make it fun and enjoyable, of course) will be enough to create the entity and even tie it to a physical object, if you desire. Again, the majority of the work will be encapsulated in the subconscious and dumped into the servitor in the process (provided that you establish a deep enough trance to make it work).
Take, for example, a character you have written a short story about. This character has a well-formed look, hopefully a well-defined personality, and various abilities. This information is contained in both your subconscious and conscious minds. From here, you could get a small statue to represent your "fictional character" and then perform an evocation of that creation. Both your subconscious mind and your conscious mind are well acquainted with this fictional creation (visual art can work this way as well). The process of ritual reframes the context of where this creation exists. It doesn't only exist in that story, it exists within your magical universe. A ritual for this could be as simple as a hypnosis session, or as complex as using reverse chi breathing while staring at the statue and repeating its name until you hit that deep enough trance state that it exists outside of your story. Of course, the ritual could also be a fun and involved process to birth your hero or villain into this world.
If one of my own creations is going to stick around for a while, regardless of what it is, I like to design a personality for it. A personality makes the creations a little more interesting and fun for me to work with, and in some cases more controllable. A created entity might develop its own personality that I could not predict. Instead, I tend to build that into the creations.
Invocation and Further Informational Transference
If you have a long-term servitor, there are other techniques you can use to "tweak" your creation. In some of the exercises, we were willing new information into the servitor, but it is equally possible to invoke your own creation and demonstrate the knowledge or download the information to the servitor through the use of sigils and trance (just like any other invocation).
The most useful information I have taught any of my servitors was how to feed themselves. In this case, I will invoke the servitor and bring its attributes to the forefront of my consciousness, just like we did with external entities before. Once I have the creation invoked, I will demonstrate the techniques of taking energy from things or places, just like we did with the energy game techniques much earlier. From here, I will evoke the spirit and then test to see whether it can draw energy from another person or other external source. If I feel that the servitor understands the lesson, then I know that it can now feed itself. From here, I usually will use positive reinforcement to teach it the importance of taking only what it needs.
As a practical bit of psychology, it may be more effective to have servitors perform actions and then continue the "positive reinforcement" strategy by feeding them when they produce results. This operant conditioning produces great results. I tend to make my servitors have built-in personality imperatives that truly and deeply love me, making it possible for them to feed themselves and really desire the praise, all the while gaining strength.
You can teach a creation to do anything you know how to do. In fact, you can transfer any information from one spirit to another by using yourself as the crucible, or by asking another spirit to instruct your new creation. If the price is right, it might agree. If you think about it, you could do this by invoking the servitor into yourself, and then invoking a second entity with the intent to "train" your creation (stacked invocations). Of course, this comes with risks, since you never know what that external entity might teach your servitor.
Combination Entities; Combining Entities into One Newer Whole
Earlier in our adventure, we were using stacked invocations and evocations as a method of spellcasting. For a moment, I want to partially challenge the "spirits as whole" idea. The idea of spirits, as we have discussed, is extremely contentious and difficult to define. However, if the personality, sensations, images, and intuitions that spirits bring are primarily informational, it is possible to create external gestalt conceptions in the same way we created temporary gestalts within ourselves. This results in things like Dionysus-Babalon, mixed angelic/demonic beings, and other mixtures that might suit magicians.
If those beings are external informational sources, stacking evocations in the same area (or invoking the beings into yourself) may create a different informational pattern and a unique combination of the two or more entities involved. Each entity can be summoned and worked with independently, but the combination of energies leads to something different from either of the preceding singular combinations.
For example, suppose you evoke two entities into the same containment field. From here you use a sigil and an ecstatically chanted sigilized mantra, and you visualize each entity in the triangle fusing together to form a new entity. Through imagination and will, you deliberately hold the new entity together in your mind and then scry out a sigil and name for the combined state. As a second part of the working, you summon forth the combination entity by itself and something with the right characteristics shows right up. Given some of the experiments with energy and broadcasting the informational patterns of entities in the adventure so far, this should not be so surprising. Now, whether the combined entity is an entirely new entity or whether it represents the fusion of two different entities is a question I leave for you to discuss.
In a way, this type of work mirrors the very way our language and thinking processes work. When we refer to a car, generally we know at some level that the car contains a "transmission," but more often than not the label of "car" is sufficient for our use in language. Likewise, a combined entity might be more in line with a purpose that we have, and the sigil/name is like the car example. At some level, we might know that a car has a transmission and wheels, but it isn't something that we concentrate on unless something is not working correctly. Likewise, we can talk about the spirit of a forest, the spirit of a tree, or the spirit of a leaf and mean entirely different things that are fundamentally comprised of the same elements.
The physical-world constraints may not apply to the conceptual work of spirits. If you can conceive and create a "link" to a combination entity, it does exist within your reality. If it gets the results you are interested in, perhaps it is a good method. Certainly, I haven't figured out how to physically merge with someone else to become a mutated human being, but that's not to say that I haven't mentally tried this. Of course, clever magicians might see capabilities to combine parts of themselves with external agents and then reabsorb the combination (thus completely mutating those parts of themselves in the process).
Practical Experiments: Planetary Intelligences and Spirits Combined
As a practical example of this combination idea, I have worked with planetary intelligences and spirits in an innovative way. In the particular system of Henry Agrippa, planetary intelligences are the "evolutionary side of the planetary resonance" (Agrippa 2006). The spirits are the shadow issues associated with any planetary resonance.
If we go back in our adventure, there are examples of evocation. For me, this practical work rests in the design of the containment field and in using the containment field to "channel the energies" to a certain point. Like the example of the elemental workings, the containment field can be an aid to the working.
In the first set of experiments, I used merely a triangle. In the Agrippa system, the planetary intelligence is considered to have dominion over the spirit side of a planet (Agrippa 2006). I would evoke the intelligence into the triangle and then evoke the spirit. Whenever I was working with a partner, and we did a simultaneous evocation, it was indeed a rough ritual for the person evoking the more difficult spirit, because it resonated with the negative side of the planetary energies. This type of work is quite informative, since you really recognize where you have shadow issues with shadow sides of the planets.
First, I would sigilize an intent into a mantra to create a combined intelligence-and-spirit planetary being of the particular planet I wanted to work with. In each case I tried this with, I would summon the intelligence and then the spirit into the triangle (in the experiments, the order was very important). Then I personally would visualize, will, and feel these becoming one "force" while I ecstatically chanted the mantra I created. This was a forceful willing of the parts together. If we use the energy-work model, it was literally pushing them together with all the "energetic" force I could muster. After there was no more resistance and I felt there was only one presence in the containment field, I would scry a combination sigil and a new form for the creation. This type of combination entity got good results for me, so I continued the experimentation.
In my experience, I have found that I could use an initial Mass of Chaos, as published in Liber Null & Psychonaut, to push chaotic energy into the containment field (Carroll 1987). This initial chaotic energy seemed to provide a mutational solvent to allow the spirit and intelligence to merge together with less resistance. It set the tone for greater and easier mutation. Likewise, I was able to combine multiple "planetary intelligences" in this manner (although combining only planetary intelligences was much easier than combining intelligence and spirit).
Going further in the experimentation, I would create temporary combinations of planetary energies and then add a third combination of spirits and intelligences, then a fourth, and so on. Between each combination, I would add a number of recitations and energy from the Mass of Chaos to add solvent. The combinations seemed infinitely wonderful, and they produced solid results. My author associate and friend Taylor Ellwood worked with one of the created planetary gestalts in this way with a lot of success.
For me, the combined entities were a lot more direct and useful in self-evolutionary methods than merely working with the neutral planetary force. This kind of combination is theoretically possible with any informational source (I have tried this with Goetic, elemental, and other odd combinations that people can ask me about in person). In each case, the combination entity seemed to be performing as desired.
Separation Entities: Breaking a Complicated Entity into Smaller Parts
But the process has to work both ways. If you can summon the spirit of a forest, you can summon the spirit of a tree, or even the spirit of a rock. Clearly, a large spirit might be too general for you to get the results you want. Instead, we might want to break down the spirit into components. When we invoke a spirit, it's fully possible that there might be parts of the entity that we don't like. In some religions, in fact, there is a notion of "paths" or different emanations of a god form. This is very similar to the idea of breaking up an entity. For instance, Venus can be a seductress, a tease, a manipulator, or even a sexual lover. If we wanted to refer only to the part that was geared toward the seductress, we could do that.
One method I have used for this is to invoke the spirit that I am trying to work with, and then ask to work with the part of that spirit (via a sigilized mantra) for a sigil and name for that part of the spirit. Of course, you can be far more aggressive with some spirits, calling them into a triangle and imagining ripping them apart into components. If you know what part you are looking for, you can use divination, sigil magic, and intense, full-sensory imagination to evoke something in a triangle and separate out that piece of the entity. I will tend to use the idea of entities as a collection of threads, and then I will take out the threads that have the pattern I am looking for (usually, I will ask the entity to let me copy the informational content). One way to do this, however, is to visualize the form of the evoked entity and then see the part of it that you want to work with as a different color. Visualize this part of the spirit growing brighter as you work with the sigil and mantra for the component. Once the parts are extremely bright and in the color you chose for those parts, visualize, feel, and see the colored parts separating from the entity, and feel the presence of two entities before you. Let me tell you that when you practice this, it might be a situation of your willpower versus their willpower, if you don't have a previous arrangement. Some occult books of a more vampiric sort recommend this style of entity work, or at least this style of entity vampirism. You could do it, but man, if someone did this to me, I would be highly pissed off. But your actions are your own.
Another interesting technique I have tried is to combine different parts of entities into new gestalts in the same way we were combining different parts of ourselves. I leave the exact process of doing this as an exercise for you. This is like creating chimeras out of different energy patterns from different parts of previous entities. It is like entity alchemy, which I have done so much of that it might form a completely different book. The methods are not so different from broadcasting the informational patterns of an entity that you have invoked. Think about that. Ideally, you would do this if there were something in you that is lacking, so you have to go outside yourself to find the components. Likewise, integrating the parts of a different entity into yourself can produce a useful mutation. Keep in mind that other people most certainly will use the entity in its original unified state, and perhaps you are just filtering different informational patterns out of the energy that you yourself are tapping into (after having generated that energy in the course of a ritual). We will talk a little more about this idea later in this chapter.
Practical Example: Weaving Techniques of Servitor Design
When I first started magic, I could not really explain how I was weaving the servitors together, but now I can explain how I made them. I still use and love several of the creations that I made using this methodology, but I warn you, fellow adventurer, that these servitors take a fair amount of time to create. A good portion of the details can be replicated in an astral temple, which is how I actually created my servitors. We will cover the basics of astral work in the next chapter.
In the work of Carlos Castaneda (1972), there are several instances of human auras looking like a mesh of interlocked energy threads bound up at the top and the bottom. I often see entities as interwoven patterns of threads that are somewhat repetitive or even fractal in nature. This metaphor has always stuck with me, and when I was doing far more astral work, it was generally the primary means I used to see entities. But this metaphor provides a very powerful method for working with them.
What if you created a servitor by empowering physical threads? In a way, this is similar to the process of weaving a tapestry. I offer this method of entity creation only to encourage you to develop your own techniques and possibly even share them with me. If you have a certain combination of informationally tainted energy that you want a servitor to have, you can weave a mesh with the entity, taking the time to really bind the different energies together. If you really think about the process, this is horribly tedious in the way that making a traditional Japanese sword is a tedious process, but the result usually will be a masterpiece. This would not be a good process to go through for a servitor that was intended for a one-time use.
In practical terms, there is a lot of homework you have to do before you can start. Before beginning, you have to know what purpose your entity will have (just like we have been doing). This purpose is often more general than a specific intent. For instance, I have created an entity that was for protection. Another entity created in this fashion was created to basically steal other people's familiars that bothered me. In this case, you should develop a personality for the servitor. If you don't own a book on basic psychology, I highly recommend you get one. Write down how the servitor would react to different situations, and describe its personality. Be as detailed as possible. Think about how many different situations you can put the servitor in and, based on your developing understanding and clarification of the creation's personality, how it might react. Secondly, you have to scry or sigilize a name (or binding mantra or sigil). Remember, this link could also be a smell or gesture (although for this particular technique, a gesture would be difficult). You will also need to know what the entity will look like-what form it will have when you are all finished. Again, go into a trance state and ask yourself. Usually when you start working on something like this, the details just seem to fall in line. The personality should fit the purpose, and the way the entity looks should also fit the purpose.
Given the personality you envision and the purpose, you can kind of figure out which energy patterns you have to include in the creation process. It's a good idea to brainstorm and write out what energy patterns you need to include. For instance, having worked with angelic beings for several years, I have a general angelic schema for how I understand the common "pattern" between angels. In essence, I have abstracted away the personality details and tried to understand what "angelic" means to me. I believed that my protection entity should have some angelic features. I found a way to map that general "angelic" definition to a certain set of ideas, feelings, and experiences, which I could then map to different body sensations, images, sounds ... basically, sensory data. This is exactly like what we were doing before. But I also wanted my creation to be able to protect me or others. So I included the information pattern of self-sacrifice (meaning that it should do anything it has to in order to protect me), mapping this concept to physical sensations, memories, and states of mind. As you are brainstorming about what information/energy patterns to include in your budding creation, you most certainly can use divination techniques to see if the package is fitting together.
Once you have a list of the "energies" you are including in the creation, you have to decide how much of each "pattern" you are going to include. For every single entry on the list you settle on, you should be able to map the word or concept to sensory data or memories, or even an alphabet of desire sigil. We have done most of this process before. Again, I can't tell you exactly what you need to include for your project, but you can ask your subconscious via divination and all the techniques we've covered about having conversations. If you have guides you really trust, you can ask for their assistance and help as well.
For each "information" pattern that you list, you want to try to associate a combination of colors, a fractal or color pattern, or just a solid color. When I have done this in the physical world, as opposed to the astral world, my experience has been that it is much easier to associate each item on the list I created with a solid color. Once you have the list, get a small bit of yarn for each color that you need. You have to use your intuition concerning how big you want your final creation to be-this will determine how much yarn you will need. If you have a complicated form, you may have to get some metalwork or woodwork to provide some sort of support for the creation. Really, that is something you will have to determine. If you know, in general, how much and how big you want the final physical product to be, you can then estimate how many pieces of yarn you need. Look at how much of each type of energy you want to have for your creation, and that percentage roughly indicates how many pieces of each color of yarn you will need. When I have done this physically, I just use the best-guess estimation process. Usually, I will either make a personal life form or something that does not require a "structure" With astral work, obviously, I can't use yarn, but each thread usually reflects a greater attention to the detail of the exact pattern I sense should be applied.
I personally love working with herbs and oils. Through divination, intuition, and having conversations with myself, I will make corre spondences from each item on my list and apply them to combinations of herbs and oils. If you really were doing the previous exercises and have a well-detailed journal, you might already have these correspondences. This isn't completely necessary, but the final product for me has been much stronger when I take this step. If the correspondences are primarily herbal, I will make a wash. Personally, I will usually sing to the herbs as I am making the wash. That's just an odd bit of trivia about my magical work. However, you should somehow push your energy into the herbs or oil. From here, I will completely oil, or soak, each piece of yarn with the right correspondences that I linked to the original list of what should be included. I have included my blood in the creation process, often later imbuing the creation with the intent "You shall listen to only me," using the strong link of the blood to make sure there is no confusion.
These processes might sound horribly complicated, but the methods simply combine techniques discussed earlier in our adventure. As you are soaking or oiling each piece of yarn, you want to take on the state of mind that the piece of yarn links to and push as much informationally tainted energy into the piece of yarn as possible. Usually, oiling and soaking the yarn will make it more receptive to holding more energy of the specific type you are pushing into that piece of yarn. We covered the techniques of projecting energy into temporary talismans and physical talismans a bit earlier in our adventure.
Once you have each strand oiled, soaked, and charged, the process of weaving the servitor into physical reality takes place. I will typically place all the yarn together into roughly the shape that the form of the entity will eventually take. I usually will put the sigil for my creation in some place around the yarn or right underneath it (so I can easily see it). Of course, take the time to clear your mind and go into a trance state. Once you have the "yarn threads" together, you can visualize and feel the presence of the form you have chosen for your entity over the yarn while chanting the name of the entity. If you can, visualize the sigil over the form and the yarn. For effect, magical completeness, and symmetry, you may wish to light a candle anointed with the different oils used in the creation process, or an incense that mixes all the herbs used in the soaking process (of course, do not burn toxic herbs). This will further bind the creation together, and it will further help the working come together as a complete whole.
As you are chanting, you are physically pushing energy into your creation while knotting every piece of yarn to each other piece of yarn. Essentially, you are weaving the entity together, physically and metaphysically. If there is an underlying skeletal structure needed to create the form of the entity, you would also tie each part of yarn to that skeletal structure. This is done while chanting and visualizing the form of the entity over the process. You can listen and hear the entity and imagine the personality that you gave it, bubbling up more and more to the surface as you are weaving. It may take more than one sitting to finish the binding-together process. It is helpful to feel and imagine that you start with yarn and a light overlay of the form, and you move to not seeing or, if you prefer, feeling the yarn at all and imagining only the entity before you.
When you are finished knotting the yarn together, evoke (using your five senses) the fully finished creation, now complete with a personality. You should imagine that the yarn creation fully becomes the entity. Visualize the sigil over the creation, and have a "conversation" expressing what you presently want to your creation to do, using all five of your senses (or as many as possible). Divination at several steps should be used to check on the progress of the creation and its capabilities. You might have to add something or tweak the entity during the creation process as your subconscious mind gives you more details about the work. You should be in a deep enough trance state that you see and feel the entity present over any other "sensory" cues. After this process, I recommend setting aside the creation for a couple days (as a sort of jelling period) and doing a full conversation/evocation ritual with the creation. In this evocation procedure, you are again reintegrating the current immediate request and explaining to the creation that it will be fed more energy or praise as a reward only if it produces results. This additional conditioning will leverage the personality that you built into the intent for the creation to continuously produce the desired results (and that's after building the love impetus into the creation).
From here, you may wish to artistically cover the yarn weave or incorporate this "core" weave to be part of a much nicer artistic statue. This is up to you, as the individual working the magic. There are some good Internet sites describing different types of knots and how to do this style of knotwork. I personally like making a big mesh, and you can get intensely creative with the pattern of knots. At first, I would use divination to check to see if there was something the entity needed to know that I did not include in the process to produce the desired and consistent results. Usually, I have seen startling results pretty quickly after this type of work, and the creations do evolve and get much better at producing those results.
The purpose of this long series of techniques was again not so that fellow adventurers can directly copy me. Of course, you may feel free to copy my methodologies and add to them. The real purpose is to tangibly illustrate the process of working from a metaphor to a completed project, using the techniques we have been developing for ourselves. I started with the metaphor of threads making up "spirits," and then used that metaphor to create an entity. Now, the trick here was to break down each step of the process into a technique or series of techniques that you could understand and use with the other techniques you already understand and use. This process is very reminiscent of the NLP idea of breaking your goal into manageable steps and the object-oriented computer-science idea of using repeatable building blocks. I hope you will take a moment and share your creation with me.
Seed Crystals from Established Entities and Rebirthing Your Own Seed Crystals
Let's go back to the idea of external entities. We were previously mutating them, recombining them, and doing naughty things generally frowned upon by more religious types, but these ideas are well justified by experience, results, and experimentation. When we summon an entity, it has been my experience that the entity follows the general ideas we have of it, but as we develop a relationship with it, our methods of interacting and the ways it interacts with us change and shift. In some cases, the entity may reveal "greater" mysteries. The relationship of magician to entity seems to form a third aspect of the process, which at least affects the magician. Also, some systems even encourage or have methods for doing very bad things to the entities, including destroying them and vampirically feeding off them; and yet when someone new comes to one of those systems, an entity will show up as if nothing happened.
For a minute let's look at The Lesser Key of Solomon. In The Lesser Key of Solomon, there are many spirits. There are methods for binding a spirit to a bottle, for torturing a spirit, and so forth. In the same moment that the spirit is getting bound in one setting, it is mathematically probable that someone in another setting is having a good time chatting with the entity and receiving what he or she asked for. The fact that these two workings occur at the same time and neither has an effect on the other has always been extremely interesting to me.
In my experience, there has always seemed to be a difference between what I consider known entities and more individualist entities, although this can be a matter of perspective, as anything else may be. Entities that are present in books seem to replicate or respawn from a mythological basis. I have found that random phantoms-such as some of the spirits that gather around Ouija boards-might not have this ability. A useful metaphor to explain this is to use the logic of tempering crystals or solids. In chemistry we see that solids will crystallize in a way that mirrors an established crystal pattern if one is avail able. For example, if you want to create a specific kind of chocolate, often you will add flakes to the chocolate that actually help to hold the chocolate together better, because the chocolate forms crystals like the original crystals. Hardeners added to wax, and carbon (along with a host of other elements) added to steel, are used in a similar manner to provide a crystalline base for molecules to latch onto and form a different structure. The addition of a pattern of crystallization changes the principles of how the solid reacts. In the novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (1963), a scientist invents a water crystal that will cause water to freeze at 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Energy metaphorically might work in a similar way.
Let's say we summon forth a spirit into a containment field. We are generating lots of energy and projecting that energy, which is similar to but not exactly the same as that of the original entity. For a minute, we can assume that an entity does not have to exist in the same sense of conscious time where there is a chain of cause and effect. As we summon the new entity, the connection is made to the original entity, and the raised energy is slightly shifted toward the energy pattern of the original entity in the way chocolate crystals are added to melted chocolate. At this point, ideally, there is enough energy for manifestation to occur (melted chocolate), and then the entity appears. When we were working with our energy, we could taint the energy we were projecting with informational content. Likewise, an external entity probably can taint the energy built up in a triangle with an informational stream consistent with its matrix with very little effort, since the barriers between us and the spiritual worlds (even if they are only in our minds) get temporarily removed in successful rituals. The information/energy patterns, as we have seen, have been remarkably contagious. An alternate explanation of the invocational process is that our internal energy patterns resonate with the entity. In essence, it is as if making a connection to an entity allows us to "temper" ourselves in the ritual, thus becoming the entity. This is a purely informationally patterned view of entities and one that accounts for the two-at-once phenomenon.
Now, in Goetic work, we will open physical seals, meaning we have an open connection to that information pattern. The nature of the entity may very well shift, as the relationship with the entity does change. Arguably what is shifting is the information-tainted energy that the magician has built up through the process of ritual.
The metaphor can really apply to any god form or externally known entity, and if announced, it can apply to created servitors and egregores as well. In some cases, the informational content of the seed crystals forms a more robust pattern, but the consciousness of the magician or priest will have an impact on the final crystal pattern.
This idea of a seed crystal can go both ways. Since people can have interconnections between parts of themselves, there is no reason to assume that creations resonant with a seed crystal will not have a link back to the mother ship, as it were. These talismans are the gods of the system. In some systems, the talismans are initially consecrated with a blood sacrifice of an animal to the spirit within the talisman. There is a fair amount of energy released in the process. One way to look at this process is not to see all the energy going back to the original spirit; in fact, in my perception of the experience, the lion's share of the portion goes to the localized seed crystal, which then forms a potent talisman for the believer. In a way, it's a very potent magical shortcut to empower the seed crystal (the person's talisman) quickly. As more sacrifices of prayer, blood, and food are made to these talismans, the believer's talisman becomes stronger and stronger, having been fed a good deal of energy that is close enough for the seed crystal to use. This seed crystal is patterned after the original god form, but it is separate from that god form. Because the information is linked, there is a link between the talisman, which is independent, and the god form.
Of course, a religion will have a standardized set of herbs and prayers, but often it is only within the sect or house that the herbs are used and prayers are the same. Additionally, the skill of the priests or priestesses to connect to the informational pattern of the former crystal seed; their skill at energy manipulation and magical work; their knowledge of the patterns, prayers, and rituals within and around any god form; and their own unique energy will all affect the creation. This means that, ultimately, the informational patterns of talismans that represent the same god or force will be slightly different and contain mutations, since there is an interaction with every person in the chain of talismans that were created. Of course, the entities still seem to come and work with people outside of various initiatory systems, so a budding magician can question and come to his or her own conclusions about why that is.
As a quick aside, I do believe in honoring, practicing, and working in the original systems when that option is available to me, as they are very beautiful. I will say that correctly and ethically run initiatory religion systems provide a support network that operates or should operate like an extended family or tribe. This is something that I personally find extremely appealing and needed in modern times to combat the growing destruction of anything that could be considered a family. Unfortunately, many initiatory religions currently operate more on the pyramid idea of generating money and power for the priest involved than the idea of a tribe.
Creating Your Own Seed Matrix
We can create entities that can work in similar ways to the preceding examples if we carry the metaphor down to the specific details of magical work. This is not nearly as difficult as it may seem. First, you need to have a robust, well-defined entity. This can be an entity that you have created or an entity that is known to others. A good way to think about this is that we will take or replicate a small piece of the entity we work with (which is partially mutated by the process of ritual) and use that as the seed crystal to birth a new, similar entity. Through my experimentation, I've determined that the seed crystals are best tied to physical talismans, and I would recommend magical links between the two physical seed crystals. Usually, this is done as a one-way stream feeding energy back to the creation crystal, but as we discovered through our experiments with the magical link, there is no reason this has to be a one-way current. Often, the informational pattern of the entity or creation involved will prevent this from being misused (especially if it is built into the creation).
When we link a creation or an external entity to a physical object and we have worked with the entity as the object, we can push more energy into it. This empowers the spirit and our personal seed crystal.
From here, all the methods we have discussed in the book so far come into play. We can query the entity or creation through a conversation about what herbs or oils would be good for the ritual. We can then map the entity or creation to certain states of mind (which should have been done long before now), projecting them to empower and make ready the second base. We can then ask the duplicate entity to lend some of its energy to crystallize a second base (this also creates a magical link between the entity and the second base). Finally, we can augment, create, and tweak a magical link between the two physical bases by some of the very techniques we used earlier in the adventure.
In practice, we can tie the entity to a second base. We just need to push energy while we are in the same state of mind as the first ritual by intensely taking on the memory of that first ritual and then projecting that over both seed crystals. We could use a sigil or barbaric speaking (speech in a made-up or alternate language) from the first seed crystal to evoke the entity over the base. Since you probably already have a unique sigil for the entity, this can actually be applied to the second base as well. Linking the two physical talismans probably will take another step. When I would do this, I would link them together by having them touch each other for a while as I was in a trance state. Then, I would separate them but envision a cord with energy and information running between them. I would also invoke the creation or entity involved to further push myself into a state of mind conducive to the entity. Then, I would ask the entity for help to connect the parts of itself (making it see the parts as pieces of a greater whole). Ideally, you would want to keep the ritual of creating new seed crystals the same each time to produce as similar a resonance as possible between each linked physical talisman. This technique will produce a pyramid-like linking structure, where each of components goes through a certain node. There are probably a million other ways to carry out the process of this one idea, and I look forward to hearing from you about your innovative techniques.
The practical example of this will indeed be this book. Before I hand you the practical seed-crystal design for the book (which looks far more like a neural network than a pyramid, with more lateral and nonlat- eral interconnections than a pyramid), I want you to post some of your magical adventures using the systems outlined in this book. That is one of the necessary sacrifices. Check out the webpage for the book, and see the information on how to receive and what the seed crystal will actually do for you (it does something extraordinarily fun-it doesn't just make me rich and powerful).
