Magic 201: Divinity and Hunger
A reminder: a teacher is here to prevent you from getting into more trouble than you can handle. You need a teacher. This is not a ‘teach yourself’ religion or magic.
In this series, it’s been mentioned several times that many of the entities a magician runs into on the astral or spiritual planes have an ulterior motive. There are many potential ulterior motives for their interest in a magician, but one of the most common has to do with hunger. The divine is an enormous (infinite) source of energy, but dealing with the divine directly requires letting go of your illusions. One of the most common illusions is that you are positioned to control yourself without having to change. Spirits can have this delusion just as easily as people. Spirits and people with this delusion are quite common.
These spirits cannot directly use divine energy. Instead, they can steal or barter for other sources of energy, among them the life energy produced by magicians and people in general. This is a weaker source of energy, but it allows spirits (and people) to try not to have to change themselves or otherwise confront their own inability to control themselves—to be blunt, most spirits and people would rather live in pain and filth than experience the discomfort of change. Their motivation is to accrue relationships, whether consensual or not, that allow them to get the energy they feel they need. There are a lot of ways for them to get this energy which are not readily apparent to a new magician, so it can be assumed that their motivation is consistently to get the magician into a relationship which feeds them. It ends up being a new magician’s problem to try and figure out how the spirit is going to get that energy and to negotiate as carefully as they can.
Because trying to prevent entropy or change from happening is utterly futile, these spirits can never get enough energy. Because they are delusional, they cannot afford to acknowledge that what they’re doing is impossible, which makes many of these spirits ravenous. They have no motivation to be truthful, nor any motivation to not try to get more out of a magician. These spirits will inevitably attempt to change the terms of the relationship over time, some with more patience than others.
One of the reasons it is generally best to deal with the spirits of one’s court is because they are divine in nature and do not need the life or magical energy of the magician to have a relationship with that magician. This is also one of the reasons it is a very bad idea for people who have not been called to this path to attempt to set foot on it: without a court and a calling, there is no way to avoid or deal with the enormous number of ravenous, rapacious spirits which exist in the astral or spiritual realms.
Even for those called to this path, it is extremely dangerous. One of the things a teacher does for a new magician is help them understand the ways a spirit can manipulate them into an agreement which can cause them harm, and help them recover if they end up in one of those relationships.
