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starberryghost · 4 years ago

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I'm super late to this series, and I'm sorry if it's a dumb question, but how do you break the curse?

Are you looking to break the curse, anon? :P

[As always, this blog is NOT spoiler free.] Well, first, it might help to know what exactly the curse is.

That answer also includes an explanation of how the curse breaks in the story. But I’ll give an additional answer below. So the way your question is phrased it seems like you’re looking for a generality, as in how anyone who just decided they wanted to would go about getting the curse to break. But that isn’t how it works in the story. Isuzu is one character who thinks it might work that way and goes looking for some specific answer or formula for breaking the curse. Shigure then explains to her that isn’t how it works and there is no answer like that. Shigure is also trying to break the curse but he’s aware that it isn’t something he can specifically do, it’s a process ultimately out of his hands that he can only nudge along a little if he wants to try. It’s also important that Shigure theorized that the curse was already going to break with his generation of zodiacs - it wasn’t something he set in motion but something that he was pretty sure was already happening. The simplest answer is that the bond/curse breaks because it is unnatural and even though its very premise is that it will be sustained indefinitely, it can’t be. So, ultimately, time. Time breaks the curse.

The other factor is the reason time breaks the bond/curse. Why does time wear it down? Why is it unnatural and can’t be sustained? Because people and their feelings and their relationships, ultimately, cannot be bound and cannot stay the same forever. People naturally move on, start to feel differently, form relationships with other people.

The last factor is that the Sohma family does everything in their power to keep the above from happening, so where Shigure’s goals come into play is him seeing this and trying to dismantle those unnatural restrictions to whatever little degree he can in a way that he thinks might help “quicken” what is going to happen naturally anyway. There is an argument to be made that over the course of Fruits Basket the breaking of the curse was “quickened”. It was breaking anyway, as evidenced by Kureno’s curse breaking way back when he was a young teenager, but it may have only continued to break one by one and only completely broken once everyone was much older, if not for other circumstances that interfered and hurried it along. One of those circumstances would have been Tohru becoming a part of the family. Tohru didn’t do anything specific to break the curse either, but she facilitated a lot of that natural “moving on, feeling differently, forming relationships with other people” that may not have happened as quickly or at all in the same way if not for her presence. There is also an argument to be made that the linchpin in all this are Akito, Kyo, and Yuki, since they are at the center of the original bond. The curse finally broke all at once when 3 important things were happening - 1) Kyo was deciding to stand up for himself and refuse to go the Cat’s room and declaring that he would be with Tohru; 2) Yuki was doing something similar and about to tell Machi about his curse and fully declare his feelings for her, and; 3) Akito was ready to let go of the Sohma family customs, destroy the Cat’s room, try to live as only herself, and let go of the meaning and practices of the bond in general.So, there you have it. That’s “how you break the curse” - form an unconditional, eternal bond with a group of animals/people and then watch it inevitably break down through the forces of natural lived experiences :D - Mod Red (Christa)

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starberryghost · 4 years ago

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Servitors

Source: [“Aspects of Evocation” by Phil Hine]

A Servitor is an entity consciously created or generated, using evocatory techniques, to perform a task or service. In the Western Esoteric Tradition, such entities are sometimes referred to as ‘thoughtforms.’ Servitors can be usefully deployed to perform a wide range of tasks or functions on your behalf.

Servitors can be created to work with one particular situation or event or, alternatively, Servitors can be created which have a general provenance in one area, such as healing.

There are a number of advantages to using more generalised Servitors. Firstly, they can be regarded as 'expert’ systems which learn from being given a task to execute - as if the more healing tasks you give a servitor, the better it seems to become at healing. Secondly, continued use of the Servitor, with successful results, builds up confidence in its activity on the part of those who use it. With a more generalised Servitor, anyone who knows its activation sequence (such as a mantra, sigil, or visualisation sequence) can employ it to work at a given task.

One example of this form of Servitor is the entity ICANDOO. ICANDOO (I-can-do) was created at an open group workshop in Servitor creation. The name of the Servitor was also its mantra for summoning it, and its general brief was to assist those who used it for overcoming any obstacles that crossed them. ICANDOO was created by a group of 12 people, and all of them used the Servitor throughout the day, to assist them with problems of one sort or another. In the design sequence, the Servitor was given the ability to divide itself holographically, so that each segment contained the powers and abilities of the original entity.

On a still further level of generalisation, you can create Servitors who have no specific function or provenance, saving that they serve to increase the success of one’s own magics. Such servitors can be used in both major and minor acts of magic, and are particularly useful in acts of enchantment, divination, or illumination.

Servitor Dependency

It is generally held that each usage of a Servitor serves to ‘feed’ it, and that each result which is rated as a success, serves to enhance its power. It is also a good idea to get into the habit of attributing any occurrences within the sphere of activity of that Servitor, to its work. This can lead to problems, though.

In 1992 I created a Servitor called Eureka. Its given sphere of activity was that of Illumination - inspiration, new ideas, the boosting of creativity and brainstorming in general. Initially, the Servitor exceeded all my expectations of its performance. I used it to stimulate new ideas for writing, lecturing and facilitating seminars & workshops. With a colleague, it became a focus for brainstorming - acting as a Third Mind arising from conversation. Each time we made a creative leap, or an idea formed became something workable in practice, the power of the Servitor was boosted. In 1993, the activity of Eureka was linked with the Neptune-Uranus conjunction with the result that, on April 22nd, as Neptune & Uranus began to retrograde, Eureka went offline.

The immediate result of this was that I suddenly found it much harder to get into a flow of creative thinking. It seemed that Eureka had become such a dominant element in the dynamics of my own creative process that, once it was removed, I found it much harder to get into the appropriate frame of mind. I had become dependent upon the Servitor. Eventually, the Servitor was recalled and disassembled in such a way that a ‘splinter’ of its original power survived as a focus for illumination. Having been made wiser by this experience, I only occasionally use this fragment of the original servitor as a focus for creativity.

Viral Servitors

It is possible to instruct Servitors to replicate or reproduce themselves. Approaches to this include instructing the Servitor to replicate itself as a form of cell-division, replication which follows cybernetic or viral parameters, or to create a servitor which ‘gives birth’ according to particular parameters, such as time-units, astrological transits, or each time the target of the Servitor carries out a particular behaviour.

An early test of this concept was that of a Servitor dispatched to assist in the recovery of property being withheld from its owner. Once a set deadline had been passed, the Servitor began to generate a field of ‘confusion’ - lost keys, electrical blowouts & other minor but annoying problems. After a second set deadline, the Servitor began to replicate itself, so that the confusion field generated was intensified. As soon as the recipient of the Servitor returned the property he had been withholding from its owner, the Servitors ceased to function. Evidence of the Servitors’ action - the intensification of minor problems escalating into strange poltergeist-type phenomenon - was gathered by talking to associates of the target.

Viral Servitors are particularly appropriate for long-term enchantments, such as increasing the probability of one’s magic being successful, or being used in healing & general protection workings.

Servitor Design Sequence

01. Define General Intent

The first step in designing a Servitor is to decide the general sphere of influence into which your intention falls, such as healing, protection, binding, harmony, luck, divination, mood enhancement, success in …, and so forth.

Defining your general intent will assist you if you wish to use symbols & magical correspondences in creating your servitor. For example, if you were interested in creating a servitor to act within the sphere of Healing, then you could assemble any associations, symbols, emotions, memories, etc. which you relate to the concept of Healing. By consulting a book of magical correspondences such as ‘777,’ you could build up chains of correspondences - planetary figures, scents, colours, planetary hours etc. How far you go in this direction is very much a matter of personal choice.

02. Defining Specific Intent

Here, you are creating the core of the Servitors purpose the Statement of Intent which is analogous to the Servitor’s aetheric DNA. Formulating the Servitor’s Statement of Intent may necessitate a good deal of self-analysis into your motivations, desires, realistic projections of goals, etc. As in all sorcery operations, it is appropriate to ask advice from your preferred form of divination. To continue the example of a Healing Servitor, an appropriate Statement of Intent might be:

“To promote rapid recovery and health in …(name)…”

Once you have determined the appropriate Intent to form the basis of your Servitor, then the Statement can be rendered into a sigil, or glyph.

03. What Symbols Are Appropriate to the Servitors Task?

There is a wealth of magical & mythic symbols which you can draw upon when creating a Servitor, which can be used to represent different qualities, abilities and attributes. There is also the symbolism of colour, smell, sound & other sensory media to draw upon. In order to refine the ‘program’ which forms the basis for your Servitor further, you could embellish the sigil by adding other symbols.

04. Is there a Time Factor to Consider?

Here, you should consider the duration of the Servitor’s operation. In other words, do you want the Servitor to be ‘working’ continuously, or only at specific periods? Here, you may wish to take into account phases of the moon, astrological conjunctions or planetary hours, for example, which could be added into the Servitor’s symbolic instructions.

The Healing Servitor above, for example, was instructed to be active for a period of seven days, affecting its target recipient for seven minutes, at seven hour intervals. This instruction serves to reinforce the number symbolism & association with harmony.

It is also at this point that you should consider what happens after the Servitor has performed its task. It is generally held to be preferable that when a Servitor has completed its task, the Servitor should be disassembled by its creator. There are two approaches to doing this.

Firstly, one can encode a self-destruct instruction into the Servitor at the time of its creation, where the duration of its existence is defined in terms of the duration of its task, or the fulfilment of a specific condition.

The other approach to disassembly is to perform a ritual ‘reabsorption’ of the Servitor, mentally drawing it back from its task, taking it apart by visualization, taking back the original desire which sparked its creation, and taking apart or destroying any material base which you have created for it. Whilst classical occult theory has it that if you do not look after your thoughtforms, they will wander around the astral plane annoying people, there is good psychological sense for terminating the ‘life’ of Servitors which have completed their assigned task - that you are reclaiming responsibility for that desire-complex which you used to create the Servitor.

05. Is A Name Required?

The Servitor can be given a name which can be used, in addition to its sigil, for creating, powering, or controlling it. A name also acts to further create a Servitor’s persona. A name can reflect the Servitors task, or be formed from a mantric sigil of its Statement of Intent.

06. Is a Material Base Required?

The Material base is some physical focus for the Servitor’s existence. This can help to define the Servitor as an individual entity, and can be used if you need to recall the Servitor for any reason. Examples of a material base include bottles, rings, crystals, small figurines as used in fantasy role-playing or figures crafted from modelling compounds. Bodily fluids can be applied to the material base to increase the perceived link between creator and entity. This is very much a matter of personal taste. Alternatively, the Servitor can remain freely mobile as an aetheric entity. I tend to find that one-shot, task-specific servitors can be left as aetheric entities, whilst for entities which have more of a long-term use, a material base is often helpful. For others, it might be possible to link their use to a specific, identifiable, state of consciousness, which forms part of the core associations which one builds up for a Servitor.

It is also possible to link a Servitor to a specific smell, such as a perfume or essential oil, so that each time the oil is applied, the Servitor is activated. This can be particularly useful when creating Servitors for general Healing, Protection, or enhancement of a particular mood. A dab of the perfume can be put onto the Servitors material base, and the perfume should be inhaled during the launch of the entity.

07. Is a Specific Shape Required?

Servitors can be created to have any desired shape, from tiny homunculi to morphic spheres capable of extruding any required appendage. The shape you choose to identify with this particular thoughtform can add another level of representational identity to the entity. A common practice though, is to visualize the Servitor as a featureless sphere, pulsing with energy, glowing with appropriately chosen colours, into which has been impressed, its sigilised instructions.

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