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Don't Blame Me, Blame My Servitor

by Fenwick Rysen
26 July 1998
(Published in "Kaos Magick Journal" Summer, 1999)

I'm not sure whether I should be worried or not. You see, Chronos is a nice enough God of Time, but he is a
bit old and I'm not sure he stands a chance against what's about to hit him. Of course, he has enslaved all of
Western society to the clock, so maybe he deserves it, but still yet I feel kind of sorry for him.

You see, it all started when I began playing with the idea of time magick. Not that I'm responsible for what's
coming, mind you--- I'll pass the blame off to Fotamecus before anyone blames me. I turned him loose a long
time ago, and I take no responsibility for his actions, especially with him ranting "Chronos, your time has
come" every time I see him. Perhaps I should explain.

My own involvement with time magick was actually quite accidental. One day I got to thinking about time
and how it flows, and how each hour is supposed to be the same length as all the others. Yet this didn't make
sense to me--- sometimes an hour flies by as if minutes, and other times it drags on for ages. The end result of
the thinking ran something like this: If we can use magick in any area of our lives, and if Time is a mutable
substance, why can't we use magick to mess around with time? And thinking usually gets me into trouble
sooner or later.

So one afternoon, running behind schedule, the thought passed through my mind to use magick to speed the
journey. Listening to the radio as I drove down the freeway, I created a suitable Statement of Intent: "Force
Time Into Compression." Because driving doesn't lend itself well to artistic sigilization, I instead reduced it to
a four-syllable mantra that I could chant to radio music: "Fotamecus". Despite little preparation, it worked
exceptionally well, and I thought that this would be the end of it.

The next day a good friend of mine, Quinn the Mad Prophet (don't ask), approached me and asked about
sigilization techniques a la Austin Spare. Requiring a demonstration sigil, I chose to use "Fotamecus",
explaining the previous day's success with it. From the mantra, I created an artistic sigil that Quinn put in his
wallet for future reference, inadvertantly placing himself under its influence. Many stories of truly rapid
transit followed, culminating in a Metallica concert where Quinn's goal was to "suck up all that free gnosis."

All of that free gnosis that Quinn sucked up was dumped into the Fotamecus sigil to speed the trip home, and
a two hour journey took only thirty minutes. Even more surprising, the energy was enough to push the sigil
over the border to servitorhood. I've used this technique before, of feeding a sigil enough gnosis until it
created an independent servitor, but neither the Mad Prophet nor I had ever done it by accident. So without a
home and with nowhere to go, the Fotamecus servitor, young and unintelligent, started following us around.
Whenever we needed to compress or expand time we would feed it a bit of gnosis and it would do the job. It
started "growing up" as we fed it, growing a little more intelligent and a bit stronger each time we used it. We
thought this good and well, for the stronger he got the better he did his job.

Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1996, I crammed with six other chaotes into a van headed for Death Valley.
Calling on Fotamecus while in the San Francisco Bay Area, we travelled fifty miles in fifteen minutes
through both heavy traffic and the MacArthur Maze, the most dizzying interchange of highways known to

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man. Immediately after Fotamecus began to work, we lost a car of friends that had been following us.

Even though we killed 45 minutes at a rest stop afterwards, when we re-entered the freeway we met right up
with the other car even though they had never stopped. We thought the magick had worked very well until we
received the backlash later that day.

For time compressed, an equal amount of time was expanded. The balance was kept. Travelling at sixty miles
an hour, a fifteen mile stretch of desert highway took nearly an hour to cross. If we had already reached our
destination, the expansion would have been fine, but Fotamecus was only able to hold off the backlash from
the initial compression for so long.

After several similar events we mulled over various ideas to correct the problem of backlash and hit upon the
idea of viral servitors--- the key to a process of mutation that would allow Fotamecus to eventually grow
beyond our control. We worked several rituals in which we altered the sigil to make it possible for Fotamecus
to make copies of itself. These copies wired themselves into a network that made them incredibly effective at
preventing unwanted side effects. If one of them needed to compress time and another to expand it they
would pass it off to each other through the viral network, maintaining balance and reducing the possibility of
backlash.

Our only problem was that we didn't limit how large the network could grow. There was no check against
it--- nothing to keep it from getting out of our control. And the only problem with a reproducing virus is that
sooner or later it mutates.

It was about this time that news of Fotamecus started spreading through the Internet, and an online graphic of
the sigil was printed out by many for personal use. Hundreds of copies were spawned and the power of the
Fotamecus Viral Servitor Network continued to grow.

As the network grew, so did the power of Fotamecus. The whole thing started acting less and less like a
legion of indpendent servitors and more and more like an individual entity. He started showing greater signs
of intelligence--- he would hold interesting conversations, show up when needed without request, and applied
greater precision in his use of time manipulation to get the most mileage from the least effort. It became
obvious to the Mad Prophet and I that he was slipping out of our control and was about to become something
else. The mutation had begun, and there was little we could do to stop it.

Only a year after his initial creation, he ceased to be a network of pieces and became more than the sum of
his parts. His parts were still identifiable, but they were becoming less and less distinct. The viral network
itself was now stronger than the individual servitors, and looked more like a spirit in its own right with each
passing day.

The full mutation took place during the hour long Midnight to Midnight when Pacific Daylight Time became
Pacific Standard Time in October of 1997. Using mundane time expansion of an hour that didn't technically
exist, we performed a ritual in his name that was designed to charge him with power for whatever use he saw
fit. Seven people and one smashed clock were the only witnesses to the ritual.

For three days he just disappeared. Petitions for help went unanswered, conversations were one-way talks to
nothingness. Divination confirmed that yes, he was still alive, but that no, he wasn't responding to anything.
So we waited, and three days later he rose from the dead more changed than we had ever expected.

Many chaos magicians speak of spirits as spanning a continuum of power from the tiniest unintelligent
servitor, to egregores of moderate power, to godforms capable of controlling entire cultures. In one popular

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theory, all godforms were at some time on the short end of the stick, and through constant use they amassed
power and rose from servitor to egregore to full status as a godform. When asked how long this takes, many
chaotes shrug and guess that each step takes decades or even centuries. I would say that this grossly
underestimates the potential for their growth, for when we next saw Fotamecus he was no longer a puny little
servitor but an egregore powerful enough to shrug us off and make his own demands.

I still don't know what allowed him to cross that boundary. I suspect that when you give a servitor enough
energy from enough different people it will become an egregore, much as a sigil can become a servitor after
being the recipient of strong gnosis. But similar egregores I had dealt with in the past had not been nearly as
strong as Fotamecus had become, though it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise. By this time, there
were hundreds of people using him daily around the world, each of them feeding him a little more power with
each use. Along with the ritual performed during the Daylight Savings time-change, it was enough to push
him over that border with change to spare. He reintegrated the individual parts as his limbs, while the
network became his mind. Granted, he wasn't a very strong egregore yet, but he had plans of his own at this
point, and he would have been difficult for any one individual to control.

Lucky for us he was friendly and wasn't about to take revenge for any perceived abuse suffered as a servitor.
Instead he showed up, let us know of his egregore-hood and what was going on, and then faded into the
background from where he would manipulate events. One could petition him in the same manner as before,
but his skill at time manipulation had reached mastery. Oftentimes he showed up unrequested, giving help
before we could think to ask for it. There were even times when he was strong enough to get us to our
destinations before we had left for them. Certainly not the work of a puny servitor!

I don't see much of him anymore, but he does show up when I need him. He usually has a better idea of when
I need him than I do. And sometimes he just drops by for a chat. At 2 a.m. sitting in a Denny's just a few
weeks after attaining his egregore-hood, I had a particularly revealing conversation with him. It seems that
he's not satisfied with being an egregore--- he wants to head for godhood and the only thing standing in his
way is Chronos.

Chronos, god of fixed time--- his talismans are the timepieces that control our daily existence, his clocks are
the prison guards to which we have become slaves. And never do we question his authority. But what could
some upstart servitor with delusions of grandeur hope to offer?

In my own case, my full-time job became much more pleasant when I began to compress the entire day with
his help. An eight-hour day felt like four or five, and this compression was fed back as expansion of my free
time. A two hour lounge around the house often felt like three or four. If I needed more sleep, I would ask
him to expand the night-time hours, and I would awake after five hours as if I had slept in late. So much for
those last nagging doubts in my head that time is fixed and immutable. In this way does Fotamecus battle
Chronos. We may be slaves to our clocks, but there is nothing to stop us from changing the flow of hours
within those clocks.

Word has spread. More and more people are using Fotamecus every day, and with each new user he grows in
power. Already he is plotting his attacks against Chronos with what seems to be a passionate hatred centered
on vengeance for some unknown slight. He keeps muttering something about the millenium, and has told me
on more than one occassion to keep an eye on London's Millenium Dome, which will hold more than
100,000 party-goers on December 31, 1999. Such comments are usually accompanied with the astral
equivelant of a mischievous smile.

At this point I have a better relationship with him than I do with most gods I work with. And he seems to like

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me. Occasionally he pops up to tell me things to do for him, to get him out to more people or to give him
ammunition for his war against Chronos. In return for a little publicity here and there, he helps me stretch
those hours around the clock to get the most out of them. He even pokes me and prods me to write essays
about him so that others will use him. By using his name as a mantra or by creating a ritual using his sigil to
call him, he grows stronger day by day as new users feed him in return for his help. So sure, it may be neat to
tell a story about how a servitor that Quinn and I accidentally created eventually ascended to egregorehood,
but these days I feel more and more like I'm a servitor to Fotamecus that he feeds candy for being a good
little magician. An odd relationship at best.

Fotamecus has been out of my control for a very long time now. I do worry a little bit about his war with
Chronos--- I have absolutely no clue what he's got planned, and he's certainly not telling me. But to be
perfectly honest, even if I am a bit worried, I've been enjoying the show. And with the millenium just around
the corner it looks like it's only going to get better. This is what the Immanentization of the Eschaton is all
about.

This document Copywronged (x) 1998 by Fenwick Rysen

All rights reversed. Feel free to copy, hack,
splice, mangle, mutilate, spindle, twist, tear, or
re-print, as long as this copywrong notice remains
intact. Questions to fenwick @ chaosmatrix . com or
to Chaos Matrix: http://www.chaosmatrix.com

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