The Familiar
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Senior Professor of Bindings and Obligations explains a few phenomena peculiar to familiars in order to assist curious students contemplating long-term commitments.
The familiar is a complicated concept. You should be prepared to approach the topic the same way you would anything complicated: with awareness, analysis, and advice. Make sure you know what your needs are first, and then the scale of the costs and obligations, before you commit any resources.
A familiar is a companion and a helper. That’s it. Every single other characteristic is optional.
Some religions forbid them or frown on those who acquire them. Some practically require them for membership in good standing. Some practitioners of the esoteric arts are badgered by their friends and acquaintances into acquiring one about the same way someone might cheerfully and determinedly argue that you might need a pet, or a child, or an apprentice, or a lover, or an employee, or a tutor or guide—and the unconsidered acquiescence to their advice can result in the same complications as any of the above.
Did you really need one in the first place? Are you prepared to handle the commitment? How much extra time do you have for training? What is your level of patience for initial ineptitude and miscommunication, mistakes and messes? How will you handle ending the relationship if things don’t work out?
By simply asking these questions I’m sure I’ve just helped a number of you rule out any desire to bother with familiars. It’s not uncommon at all for those among us with needs for solitude and absolute control of one’s environment to not have much tolerance for the idea of an intruder.
Some of the more advanced esotericists consider them to be training wheels, so to speak. And then there are those that have positive and negative views of training wheels in general, regarding whether they offer much-needed support, instruction or consolation to a novice—or whether they allow practitioners to go “out on the open roads” before they’re truly ready “to deal with traffic” or teach bad habits that you later have to unlearn, including dependence on resources that can be taken away or attacked separately in an altercation.
Personally I’ve never said no to an affordable source of instruction as long as I could test what was being taught for veracity and usefulness. And sometimes, especially when I’m exhausted and overextended, it never hurts to have someone who can put a finger in the right place when I’m trying to tie a complicated knot. Or someone to watch in a direction or with a specific set of senses that would distract me from a current task were I to do it myself. Or someone to whom I could try to explain something complicated, which is an excellent way for me to catch my own errors in reasoning before I transform them into errors in practice.
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One tradition involving familiars is the one in which there is an existing relationship with a tutor—a physical human(ish) tutor or otherwise, perhaps a spirit or a tutelary deity—and the tutor decides if or when you should be granted a familiar and what the nature of that familiar should be. Your guide would select the familiar for you and guide you through the binding or contract or whatever methods might be appropriate to endear it to your cause for whatever duration seems appropriate to the guide.
In this circumstance, one would frequently be correct in assuming that the tutelary guide also would have a relationship with the familiar, and that the familiar would be capable of reporting on both your progress and your behavior—and also potentially capable of interfering in your projects should they not meet with the approval of your guide.
It sounds like it sucks, but if you ever find yourself in the position of tutoring a difficult student, you should be able to see the appeal.
Additionally, in some families in which cunning is the family business, relationships with either or both tutelary spirits and familiars can be inherited. This also holds for families with shamanic histories on almost every continent. In these situations you would probably be expected to make do with what the family already has—with the assurance that it has worked acceptably for generations.
Inheriting a pre-obligated spirit is a fine thing, despite the limited choice. It keeps things simple. But if you’re in the position to make your own arrangements., first decide whether you require a tutor. If you do, your tutor will likely be able to assist with all future decisions on the topic. As a student of the First University, you can check out a tutor from the collections of Professors Emeriti in the Library, or any lesser specialist on file, as you are unlikely to merit the full-time attention of any of the active teaching or research staff.
I suppose you’re free to try to attract the attention of any of the free-roaming, wild-caught sort, but why would you bother when you have access to the Library? Aside from not having to worry about them ratting you out to the administration if you get up to no good, that is.
A tutor, or tutelary spirit, is a type of familiar. The thing to keep in mind about any and all familiars is that they get unfettered access to all of your thought processes. If you wish to keep a secret from a familiar, it should be something they wouldn’t readily understand or something that wouldn’t interest them in the slightest, because everything else is fair game.
It’s in the name, you see. They are familiar. Which means they are inside of your defenses and transcend the normal rules of hospitality regarding guests and hosts as would a member of the family, because, like family, they share a level of identity with you. They are required to be familiar with everything that is going on with you, inside and out. Every definition of the word applies.
There are rules, of course, but those require separate negotiations and stipulations.
Duration of service must be negotiated. Types of duties can be enumerated categorically or in detail, as can any relevant conditions. And most importantly you must choose whether to attempt compulsion, or negotiate a strict contract which (one assumes) involves payment or services to be rendered in return for the familiar’s services, or a much less formal mutual befriending.
Hereditary familiars tend to have indefinite terms of service and will come with rules already stipulated. If you don’t like what you’ve been assigned, you’ll have to make other arrangements. But if you do, understand that that generally breaks the rules of service for the hereditary assistance. It’s best to consult your ancestors before you risk causing permanent damage to the arrangement.
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When it’s time to choose a more general familiar, some practitioners are content to leave the choices to random chance or subconscious drives. My opinion is that this is a great way to learn about the nature of random chance and explore one’s subconscious drives, but it isn’t very goal-oriented. Literally anything can serve as a template for a familiar if you provide no limitations or constraints, and please allow me to remind you at this time that microbial life in most areas vastly outnumbers anything macroscopic. Physical entities like yeasts and rotifers and tardigrades may answer your call and leave you quite confused.
Even if you specify nonphysical forms, there are numerous analogs to nonphysical microbial life—tiny and transitory and basically just krill for nonphysical grazers to consume.
You can learn an incredible amount from a microbial companion. This is absolutely true. But it can be somewhere between incredibly difficult and impossible to locate your microbial familiar so that you can fulfill your obligations to it, and that can lead to dangerous blowback.
My sincere recommendation is that you take a good look at the projects on your calendar and choose something short-term and tailored to the assistance you will need. An exception can be made for personal needs like general companionship, of course, but it has been my experience that long-term companions should be chosen with care as well.
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One of my favorite exercises to inflict on my students is to have them construct a small entity capable of being a familiar, just to teach them the core concepts of what constitutes a minimally sentient, conscious, and self-aware entity. Most humans are taught from childhood to think that consciousness is magical, or at least a “hard problem” in terms of simulation or computation, but that hasn’t been my experience. Such a practical exercise proves to my students that such things are much more simple than they have been led to believe.
Most of the problems tend to start with humans having the preconception, the prejudice, that humans are special, who then proceed with cherry-picking evidence to support any view of self-specialness and moving the goalposts when any other creatures or synthetic processes look like they’re getting close. It’s sad to watch. Also, it renders most discussion on the topic pointless. Likewise any discussion of sapience or intelligence, which is the ability to recognize patterns in time and space and motion, to predict the outcomes of actions (of oneself or of others or of natural phenomena), and to overcome obstacles between oneself and one’s goals—with bonus points granted for evidence of planning on longer timescales.
That’s it. With that in mind, you can see that many popular intelligence tests are designed by academicians to render high scores to scholarly types so that they can give themselves self-congratulatory pats on the back. Tests that measure verbal reasoning and mathematical behavior have their place, but we all know a few people capable of scoring highly on those tests who lack necessary skills for understanding the realities of the world around them.
Consciousness is a little complicated, as it turns out, but it is approachably complicated, and that’s a big realization for many. Sapience on top of consciousness is a spectrum, of course, but a high score is nearly inevitable in any lifeform that evolves in an arena of conflict and scarcity. Apparently we just won’t accept proof unless creatures can tell us about their status in a popular human language.
Anyway.
Start with a body—something self-maintaining if appropriately exposed to resources. The ability to move and a couple of manipulator appendages are a big bonus. Sense organs relevant to locating resources and avoiding hazards are definitely required. From here you can have a simple automaton with tropisms to follow resource gradients and avoid toxins from the buildup of wastes.
Next you can provide it with an internal model of its own structure, coarse or fine, so it can keep track of health, damage, and discomfort. Hunger/thirst/fullness and the need to excrete are usually a part of the model—and with some creatures, the whole of the model—but it doesn’t hurt, so to speak, to add pain receptors throughout. In common animals with a central brain, the somatosensory cortex and the motor cortex are in adjacent layers, providing (and taking advantage of) a quite literal physical map.
Any creature with even the simplest version of this map counts as sentient, which is just Latin for “feeling.” Many entities have different sorts of maps that are harder for an observer to decipher, but are still sentient. Basically anything that responds to hunger or pain counts as sentient.
My main guess for why people seem to think sentience is rare is that science fiction authors started confusing the terms “sentience” and “sapience” about forty years ago in popular media. Sapience is harder to come by. But having even a simple map of one’s internal state that one can poll to determine one’s future actions counts as minimally “self-aware.” Having an additional blank map that your creature can populate with observations or guesses to determine the possible internal state of other creatures with which it interacts is “empathy.” Being able to populate that blank map with what others might be able to observe or guess about one’s own internal state is that next level of self-awareness that students of such things place alongside supposed feats like recognizing one’s own reflection in a mirror.
No doubt the achievement of such traits in living things is quite a feat for evolution. But for a competent programmer in just about any robust high-level language, you could code a sketch of similar systems in an afternoon.
If you don’t want to spend a lot of time on communication interfaces just yet, a calculation of the sum of internal states can be reflected as an overall mood—hesitations before performing requested tasks, physical posture or facial expressions, favoring injuries, tone of voice for casual non-symbolic/non-semantic utterances, etc.
Programming actions is probably next on the list. Self-maintenance tasks in whatever standard forms are necessary for feeding, drinking, elimination, resting. Then come any tasks you need it to perform on your behalf: diagnostic reports, spying, manual assistance, fetching and carrying, etc. Then each task gets a monitor for how much that task needs to be performed, and a threshold that once it is crossed schedules the task for action, and satisfactory performing of the action reduces the monitor’s need-value, etc. From there it’s a matter of setting priorities for which tasks take precedence when there is a conflict—self-maintenance versus obedience, for instance.
You can simulate humanity coarsely by creating needs for reward chemicals and certain other popular neurotransmitters, and designating reward levels for certain activities that generate those chemicals. This also works on most other animals, but humans are the ones that have been massively infected by cultural viruses that game these neurotransmitters and reward centers for control. So why not use the control mechanisms readily supplied? It’s an excellent model.
Some portions have been glossed over, but this is the template for a conscious and self-aware autonomous creature suitable as a platform for many sophisticated enhancements.
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Many people who want a cat are not prepared to rear a kitten, much less build one from scratch. I can sympathize. To that end, let’s assume you’ve obtained some sort of minimal kratt or homunculus or animal and need to imbue it with the tools and motivations to serve your needs.
Assuming you don’t want to take the time to teach it to speak and understand speech and then spend the couple of decades necessary for it to gain an understanding of the world that would make it suitable as an adult-level assistant or companion, I suggest you locate a fully developed ba for your project and attach it. Again, the Library can be an excellent resource, but—and let me be clear—they will want it back in the same or better condition when you are done with it, and they will extract from you frightening guarantees and promises of collateral before making such a loan. As you are a new student and this is likely your first attempt, the possibilities of irreparable damage are nonnegligible. You are better off laying a trap to catch something free-range, or recruiting from among the dead or the soon-to-be-dead.
As you know from your Undead Anatomy course, a ba is the portion of a sapient spirit that is the personal record of experiences, including all of the life-long experience of self. This includes everything they know and know how to do in its most intellectual form, including any languages they might have learned. Emotional context tends to be a bit lacking, since that usually requires physical wiring—glands, motivations, needs, etc. Almost any ba can be suitable for a trainable familiar, but if you need specific languages and knowledge skills, it’s a good idea to be picky..
A ba is typically under the impression that it is a complete person with basic rights to autonomy and self-determination because that is usually how it was raised when it was alive—despite the fact that it was incorporated (in whatever way) in the first place without being consulted and endured much of its existence at the whims of whatever winds and currents drove it hither or thither. In reality, you are just one more obstacle for it to get through on its way to eternity or oblivion, but your personal sense of ethics will dictate whether you humor it. If you prefer to respect a desire for autonomy, feel free to negotiate payment (typically in the form of enriching intellectual or experiential rewards, or favors to be done for living relatives or descendants, but not always) or cajole it into thinking that the use of whatever body you’re providing will be worth any obligations you place upon it.
Once it is installed in your template’s system for motivations, it will likely experience internal reward for obedience and completing tasks on your behalf—subjective pleasure it would not have experienced otherwise—and this muddies the ethical waters for some. Alternatively I guess it could suffer nothing but misery of one kind or another until and unless it fulfills all of the obligations you’ve placed upon it, or perhaps some combination of the two.
As a rule I prefer to reserve cruelty for those who have wronged me in some way—trivial or substantial—and not waste it casually on those I’ve just met. It’s a point of personal pride. But you must choose for yourself. This isn’t an Ethics course. For some reason I’ve never been called upon to teach one.
Occasionally a harvested or trapped ba (of any origin) will have a few critical pieces missing. One is the akh or khu—please remember that “Ancient Egyptian” is a language group, not a language, and that over the span of a thousand years or more, standard pronunciations and definitions drift a bit—that is typically the seat of problem-solving and decision-making. This is one of the reasons that a ghost of a typical haunting can’t find its way out of a flat paper trap with a confusing design drawn on it or escape a kitchen without sorting a mixed pile of salt and sugar into separate piles, grain by grain. If you are supplying a body and the body you are supplying has one already, you can simply use the one supplied, but that will set the limit for the level of general cleverness you can expect from your familiar construct.
If you are working without a solid form or working from scratch, or the akh supplied with the form is inadequate, you will have to obtain one elsewhere and stitch it on, as it were, in whatever fashion is required.
Similarly the ib or jib or whatever you want to call it might be severely damaged or eaten away or missing, and without it your construct may have no sense of empathy or ethical reciprocity. In some cases this might be a bonus, depending on your aims, but it will render your familiar construct capable of appallingly monstrous behavior in the pursuit of your goals. So use your best judgment.
In many cases you can use the components that come with your co-opted animal if that’s the route you’ve chosen. Any animal that humans have decided makes a good pet is usually suitably equipped. In fact, the tendency to have a working rudimentary ib is usually a popular requirement for the selection of a species of animal for domestication.
Just to clarify, the ib to which I refer is the category of mental maps of the states of others referred to as empathy earlier, plus a general willingness to optimize the wellbeing of others in expectation that they might be inclined to reciprocate if situations were reversed. You can build one from scratch if you like and fine-tune it to suit you. This is, in fact, the cultural seat of the soul in humans, and you can make a new one yourself in your basement over the course of a few afternoons. I fail to see why anyone bothers to make such a big deal of them.
In all, it’s best to refer back to your notes for your Undead Anatomy course and make sure you’re aware of the ramifications of leaving out anything or using badly mismatched parts.
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Once your familiar is properly cobbled together and either bound or employed or befriended, you will want to see to its general care and maintenance. Any physical form employed will need exactly the same access to rest and resources as before you put your grubby mitts on it, but any additions or modifications will need continuing repair and support against wear and tear, and any automated process you’ve installed for such upkeep will need feeding as well. Any feeding from existing arcane flows will need to be balanced by corresponding enhancements to the grounding shadow—the ren or rin or whatever you prefer to call it—or strong sunlight or significant amounts of sapient attention or whatever counts as a flow where it will be deployed will shred and strip away your additions and modifications.
If your familiar’s esoteric feeding needs and shadow aren’t appropriately balanced, it may develop strange and unsavory appetites—a common condition regarding undead creatures or arcane constructs. This may require tuning as your relationship with your familiar develops, so remain observant and perform periodic evaluations.
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As I look at your faces around the classroom, I see such expressions of puzzlement. Perhaps some of you have not yet had your course in Undead Physiology. I say this without judgment and with as much understanding as I can muster. If you have not yet gotten your satisfactory mark in Undead Physiology, you are better off with just a puppy or something, maybe an iguana, and leaving it unmodified. I have no desire to join the rest of the faculty and staff in yet another panicked hunt through campus or the larger City of Dis in pursuit of a murderous monstrosity with thought processes like the necromantic summoning equivalent of botched 3D printer output stuffed into a tiny body that can hide just about anywhere.
You can even check out a puppy or an iguana or whatever from the Library if you like—but remember, if you fail to bring it back in the condition in which you received it, they will happily take their choice of an equivalent mass of animated flesh from your physical form as the promised collateral.
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But now we get to the simple part. Once you have obtained and/or assembled your familiar, documented the expected duties and conditions of service including duration of service, contracted to perform any services in return or make any compensation in the form of payment to whatever beneficiaries are specified, and established the parameters for any necessary regimen of care and maintenance, there are only two things that you need to do to establish the bond of the relationship.
Learn its true full name.
Teach it yours—which assumes, of course, that you know it.
That’s it.
For many of you, a proper familiar relationship will be the first totally honest relationship you’ve had in your short lives so far. Even if you have no need of a familiar as an assistant or servant or companion, I suggest that you try it, if only for a minimal duration—perhaps a year or even a month—just for the novelty of the experience.
Self-deception becomes completely impossible once you are required to be totally honest, voluntarily or by compulsion, with another entity. And you will not survive this curriculum if you get to the end of it still capable of self-deception. Exemplary self-knowledge is necessary to complete the final task. You will be reminded of this again and again.
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That is the end of the lesson. Write up your plan for an intended familiar in as much detail as you feel such a plan deserves and submit it to me for review before tomorrow at midnight. Do not—and I mean this with such fervor that you should feel it squirming into your eyeholes and earholes—do not enact any part of your plan until you receive my feedback.
Dismissed.