Link curator hat on:

Take a look at this article discussing some research done by Lawrence LeShan. I have fond feelings toward LeShan for a book he wrote ages ago, so it’s neat to get a peek at what he is up to presently. It is the sort of thing that should make more than a few chaos magicians smile as it talks about how some spirit guides may be pretty much the same thing as servitors.

To preface the article, I’ll quote its last sentence first:

This does not mean there are no spirits, but it does mean that we may be in touch with them less often than we think.

What is especially interesting about this article is that it draws attention to how these functional entities are created through an emotional and affective process rather than through the sort of programmatic and intellectual process used by most chaotes. Since that process is more deeply embedded in our unconscious operations, it means, too, that we are more likely to mistake it for an independent entity.

That provides us with some basis for understanding what is going on in occult fads where this or that set of spirits suddenly start manifesting to people all over the place, often in ways that don’t mesh well with their traditional appearance but do seem to mesh well with ‘popular’ images of them. Those spirits may be ‘functional’ entities of the sort described in the article, cobbled together with emotion and desire.

Those are faddish precisely because they don’t have too much reality outside that cobbling action and so crumple easily enough back into the unconsciousness as the excitement for them fades. At least until the next fad comes along and gets things going again.

ETA: There is another corollary to this way of thinking. For the real spirits out there it makes perfect sense for them to drop a functional entity out into someone’s psyche and just see what comes of it. That gets to be something like a calling card–“here you go, check in with me later if you dig.”