(This post originally appeared on my Patreon.)
Whether you’ve received a professional servitor or legion from me, made your own, purchased a bound being from a spirit keeper/conjuror, or utilized a servitor shared by another for the purposes of experimentation or sharing, you may have had the notion strike you: what if I can make this even better? More energy, more power, closer to earth; greater magnitude, greater accuracy, better results. It’s not as if there is a “cap” or maximum as to how powerful something can be, after all!
So, how does one accomplish this? It’s not as if there’s prevalent material online about training your creations, like how there is about structuring them in the first place. The lack of information has left many people with this kind of inquiry on their own to figure out how to manage it themselves.
Since energetic beings aren’t bound by the same temporal perceptual restrictions we humans are, these methods of training can be used simultaneously. “Stacking” methods allows for faster development of the creature(s) in question. The primary methods this guide goes over are two in number: study and offerings.
#1- Study/Tutelage/Information
If you’re reading this, you are literate, and your creations almost certainly are, too. This can be used to train the creatures you create or have been given, by sending or giving them written materials on the subjects you want them to be educated on. There are no limits to what this could be- scientific studies, academic textbooks, journalistic articles, fiction, etc- and can also apply to other forms of material. It can range from, but not is limited to, audiobooks, television shows, films, and videos.
You can send your creatures to consume multiple forms of media at once, and glean as much information from them as possible. Since they do not abide by the temporal perceptual bonds that we do, rather than studying one at a time, the servitors/spirits will be able to process all of them simultaneously, resulting in a marked improvement in a shorter period of time than expectations.
The next aspect of this type is tutelage. By this, I refer to the act of sending your creatures to a being that agrees to teach them skills of the desired type. Some beings are teachers by design, and are most willing to teach wayward/random creatures like servitors whatever they want to know. Many of these are depicted within Buddhist and Hindu mythology, but are not limited to those pointer-patterns. A beneficial pre-existing relationship with a spirit or deity is likely to have better results than asking a random being to teach your creature, though.
A little-known edge to this is that, like with studying, you can send your creatures to be the student of multiple beings at once, and the effects of the tutelage under them will stack on one another. This, combined with study materials, vastly improves the scale and scope of knowledge available to your servitor.
The final aspect of this field is information. While, technically speaking, both previous aspects count as part of it, in this instance I refer to direct information, AKA programming.
There is information in everything and everyone, from the air we breathe to the conceptual frameworks of society. Information is the counterpart of energy, being the logic on which energy functions, just as energy is the vehicle of information manifesting into reality. They go hand-in-hand with one another, and when you manipulate one, you manipulate the other.
The programming (or information matrices) of a creation can be adjusted long after the composition phase is complete. Regardless of why you would want to alter or add to the programming of an entity, it can be done through directly injecting information into the creature. Another term for this would be “downloading”- simply collect the information you want the being to incorporate, either as part of its functionality, purpose, mechanisms, personality, etc., and push it into their core.
The tradeoff for this method of instantaneous alteration is the acclimation period. Unlike with study and tutelage, the creature does not observe the information before it is incorporated into their being, so there will be a period of time after a download where the creation adjusts to the new information. This period can be shortened through the use of “guidebooks” being included in the download, or, more accurately, accessibility programming to allow the being control over the interface used to understand the additions. Examples include changing of purpose, altering how it performs magic, and controlling how the creature can create results.
With this section completed, it’s important to note that the methods of empowering your magical creatures are not limited to the informational sphere. For optimal results, these methods should all be used in tandem with one another.
#2- Actions/Places/Offerings
While the previous section covered the programming and knowledge aspects of magical creatures, this one focuses on the types of energies used to sustain them and strengthen their output.
Let’s first talk about actions. It may look strange to some of you- after all, how does an energetic being directly benefit from physical actions- but programming is an important support for this aspect. The practical scope of actions as utility for magical creatures is extremely wide. Your imagination is the limit, for the most part! 
We all know that actions expend physical energy of different types and quantities. The energy exerted to move your head is significantly less then the amount spent to run for a minute. Spirit creatures can be given this energy, or electric energy, or heat energy, or nuclear energy, etc- as a way of offering. You can even come to an agreement or construct a pattern for this, such as the creation absorbing some of the physical energy expended whenever you run, or the electrical energy every third time you flip on a light switch. Such sources are closer to physical reality than more esoteric and abstract energies, and can help anchor the results of your being in this world.
Another facet of this is to program actions as triggers. These can extend from the simple, such as a clenching of your fist signaling the creature to coalesce its power and presence, to the needlessly complex, as in a specific sequence of movements used to tell the being to influence X with Y energy for the next Z time. You can use actions to have your entity collect a certain energy, grow more powerful, etc- the only practical limit is what you can imagine, because what can be imagined, can be programmed.
The next part of this is the subject of places, or more specifically, habitats. Sigils are best when only used as a focal point or connector, rather than the the home of the created being. It is significantly more effective to house your creatures in habitats of their own, as these places and/or objects would then become their physical manifestations/bodies in this world. Giving your creatures a habitat is the same thing as giving them a foothold, which will result in them being more physical in presence and results.
The two general types of habitats are objects and places, and both have their advantages and drawbacks. Despite this, you don’t have to pick just one for your creature to inhabit- the more, the merrier, after all!
The advantages of objects are that you can exercise greater control over the influences that reach the habitat, and that you can go all out in creating a talismanic shrine/altar house for your creature. Such a level of control allows you to “min-max” or micromanage the powers of the inhabitant, which is most useful for results requiring precision. The disadvantages are that objects can be harder to keep track of over long periods of time, can break, and so on; as well as the minimal influence the object’s natural energies will have on the creature’s power.
The advantages of places are extremely variable, depending on the local energies and power of the land. Having your creature inhabit a place connects them to the energies of that land, on a tectonic, floral/faunal, and societal/cultural level. Their ability to influence events in that place becomes magnified, sometimes significantly so, but the events that take place in the habitat can influence the energies available to the creature, and, over enough time, it’s composition, too. The other thing to watch out for is the locals, as sometimes other spirits will see the attempt to inhabit their land as a hostile act, and may look to engage in all out conflict. If you have a servitor professionally created or upgraded by me, it can’t be exterminated by such things, but the secrets used to craft that level of survivability are uncommon, to say the least.
Moving on, we come to arguably the most important part of this section, and that is offerings. Western magic has left this critical topic aside for far too long, claiming it as a byproduct of religiosity rather than sorcery, which is incorrect. Religions that have been practiced for quite some time, including ATRs, Greek/Roman paganism, and even the nebulous cross-cultural ancestor worship all incorporate offerings into the foundations of their practice. This is because, put bluntly, they work.
The surface of offerings has been scratched many times before, with people postulating the purpose of offerings as ranging from appeasement to payment to sweetening the pot to entice beings into magically interceding in their lives. There remains a vein within the practice of offerings that is relatively unmined in the contemporary magical sphere, though more prevalent in shamanistic strains of magic, and that is offerings as energies.
If you’re my patron, and/or proficient with sorcery, you probably know by now that everything is an energy, from your very own consciousness to the wires in the device you’re using to read this. Energy types are as numerous as atoms. These include the energies within the objects used as offerings in magical and religious practices.
What this translates to is that the offerings you give your magical creatures become a part of the energetic makeup of that particular being. An example found in Aaron Leitch’s Ritual Offerings is that of the parts of a chicken- the wings, so that the creature may dart and fly between places, the feet, to claw intruders in defense of the owner, etc.
Using this logic, you can look at any object, household or exotic, and find a use for it as an offering. Again, the imagination is the limit here, as verbalized declaration of what an offering is for will prioritize that functionality within the specified energy type. Through targeted imagination, you can magnify your offerings to encompass infinite space and time, further reinforcing their effects.
You don’t even have to offer physical objects. Through the imagination, you can render objects in as much sensory detail as possible, and offer them up to comparable, if lesser (depending on the quality of sensory data used to create the imagining), effects. Hell, you don’t even have to offer objects! In some corners of the magical world, visualized places are used as offerings in conjunction with visualized objects. Apply the same logic to these places, and you unlock a vast field of options for modifying the capabilities of your creatures.
The sky (in your mind) is the limit!
Chaos