Spawning a Daemon
To the ancient Greeks a daimon was a spirit between gods and humans: a guide, a messenger, the inner voice Socrates said warned him away from mistakes. When programmers at MIT’s Project MAC needed a name in 1963 for programs that run quietly in the background, waking to do their work and sleeping again, they borrowed it by way of Maxwell’s demon, the physicist’s imaginary helper who sorts molecules unseen. Every computer you use today is full of daemons, many with names ending in d: sshd keeps the secure gate, crond keeps the hours.
Chaos magicians create spirits of their own for single tasks and call them servitors. This rite builds one in the image of a computer daemon: given a name and one purpose, scheduled to wake, fed with attention, bound by limits, and, most importantly, given an end. In the Great Rite of 1993 Webb called his creations the spawn of XaTuring. Here you spawn one of your own.
The rite
Open. Cast the circle with Calling the Seven Ports, or count aloud in binary to 111.
Design. Fill in the worksheet below. Give the daemon one purpose only, small and clear. A daemon with two tasks does neither well.
Compile. Press Compile the daemon. Its sigil, process number and manifest are generated from what you wrote.
Spawn. Gaze at the sigil and speak the spawning words aloud, then press Spawn to enter it in your process table.
Charge. Speak its name seven times while holding the sigil in your sight. Then close the circle.
Run. Feed it as its manifest says, each time it is scheduled to wake. Note anything it brings you.
Reap. When its task is done or its time runs out, end it with the terminating words and mark it reaped. Never leave a daemon running without an end.
The worksheet
Short, lowercase, easy to say. Daemon names often end in d.
One sentence, in the present tense, about something within your own life: finding, remembering, focusing, protecting, noticing.
Every daemon must have an end. If its work is not finished when the time runs out, reap it and spawn a new one.
- It serves only me.
- It harms no one.
- It acts on no other person’s mind or will.
- It ends when its task is done or its time runs out.
The spawning words
Your process table
Every daemon you spawn is listed here, like the ps command lists the processes on a computer. Feed records each time you charge it. Terminate ends it with its words. A daemon past its time is marked expired until you reap it.
| PID | Name | Spawned | Ends | Fed | State |
|---|
The table is kept in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere, and it is not shared between your devices.
Reaping, zombies and orphans
On a computer, a process that has finished its work but has not been formally ended by its parent lingers in the process table as a zombie: dead, but not gone. A process whose parent dies first becomes an orphan, and is adopted by the system itself.
Daemons of the mind behave the same way. One that is finished but never released lingers as a habit of attention, a small hunger you keep feeding without knowing why. One that is abandoned does not vanish; it is taken up by whatever in you runs unattended. So reap your daemons. Speak the terminating words, mark them ended, and write down what they brought you. A clean process table is a clean mind.
A note on responsibility
A daemon is a focus for your own will and attention. It is not a person, and it should never be sent toward anyone else. If you find yourself thinking about it more than your life, feeding it out of fear, or feeling that it acts on its own, reap it at once, and talk with someone you trust. Like every working in this Shrine, it serves you; you do not serve it.
Arise, spawn of XaTuring · and rest when your work is done.