Servitor, Egregore, Tulpa, Thoughtform: Four Words, Four Jobs

Servitor, egregore, tulpa, thoughtform. People use the four words as if they were one. The sources do not.

This is Check Date, from chaosmagick.com.

Servitor first, because it comes with a manual. Phil Hine defines it in Condensed Chaos. Quote: "an entity consciously created or generated, using evocatory techniques, to perform a task or service." One person builds it. It has one job.

Hine says the design came from studying how to program a computer in COBOL. He never got good at COBOL, he writes, but it gave him a way to look at the methods he was already using. So read a servitor as a small program. A statement of intent sits at the core, and everything else is built around it.

Peter Carroll describes the same build in Liber Null and Psychonaut, and he calls the result an elemental. You assemble a composite sigil of the attributes you want. You give it a name and an image. Then you focus on it until, in his words, these "take on a portion of the magician's life force and begin autonomous existence."

To end a simple one, he writes this. Quote: "its sigil or material basis should be destroyed and its mental image destroyed or reabsorbed by visualization."

Egregore runs on a crowd. Wikipedia defines it as a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group. A group builds it.

The word appears in the Book of Enoch, where it refers to angelic beings called watchers. René Guénon preferred the term collective entity for the group mind sense. Carroll uses the word another way. In his book it means the psychic form each species has, and he writes that people who perceive the human one usually describe it as God.

Tulpa is the one that claims to be a person. The Tibetan word, sprul pa, may mean phantom. Theosophists later folded it into the idea of the thoughtform. Alexandra David-Néel said she saw creation practices in twentieth century Tibet, and she left room for doubt. Quote: "I may have created my own hallucination."

Wikipedia's article says the Western idea developed independently of its uses in old Tibet. Hine's book does say Tibetan magic calls these entities tulpas. So the question is live.

Today the word mostly means a willed imaginary friend, kept by online practitioners. In one survey cited on Wikipedia's tulpa page, eight point five percent chose a metaphysical explanation. Seventy-six point five percent chose a neurological or psychological one. Fourteen percent chose something else.

Thoughtform is the umbrella. Annie Besant wrote a whole book called Thought Forms. Wikipedia's definitions of the egregore and the tulpa both use the word.

Sort them by three questions. Who builds it, one person or a group. What it does, a task or a claim to selfhood. How it ends.

The last one matters most. Hine writes that it is generally held to be preferable for the creator to take a servitor apart once the task is done. He gives two ways. Encode a self-destruct instruction when you create it, or reabsorb it by visualization. His reason is plain. You are reclaiming responsibility for the desire that made it.

I buried one working name instead of ending it. I have not dug it up yet.

On this site, every servitor gets an end date. Write the date before you write the name.