SRM, quit the drugs for a while and take up banishing practice. You might even consider working with the headache as an “Other” entity…

First, I have not worked with the Goeta. I have worked with entities that float around or that I “made,” and I have bumped into many of them quite unitentionally. You tend to treat them in two ways: like someone who’s on probation and you’re going to turn them in if you don’t get what you ask for, or, like Max said, quid pro quo. What do they get? you put up their sigil, you perform some unusal task, you “sacrifice a male child,” etc. I don’t see free will of anyone being compromised.

Second, in my experience sigils operate so much like entities that they may as well be the same thing, just on a less continous order. From my dreams, I also surmise that many “demons” are so half-formed, kind of like how a sigil lacks much existence beyond fetching results, that they have so much less “free” and “will” than us that it’s the equivalent of taking a dog for a walk. Are you infringing your dog’s will by walking it? What about playing with it? If it misbehaves and you punish it? Does the dog even realize you have control over it? Sometimes the dog nags you, and you do things the dog wants. Did it infringe upon your will?

We have to define “demon.” NLP frequently treats bad feelings and events in exactly the manner that a ceremonial magickian treats a demon, as a thing outside of oneself to be bargained & argued with. Not surprisingly, many people using these NLP techniques to magnify trauma and negative feelings into demonic proportions often describe the images/feelings they get in a manner very similar to some medieval pictures of the goetic demons–there’s a particular book I saw plates from that made them look less like horned people and more like shoggoths, which is what I’m getting at here. In my experience, you don’t get an entity appearing in the smoke before you so much as you get an altered state of cognition with a strong “other” component. This suggest to me that the “demonic” bears as strong internal component…

Which sounds like the Scientology Body Thetan theory. Which is fine, I’m chasing after Chornonzon here. Scientology works, just not the way the practioners expect or need. But I think there’s a truth there, and I think that it’s very revealing:

If you believe that people are composed of or influenced by disparate forces and entities, you can very easily begin a path that justifies Anarchofascistic impingement of their will, just like L. Ron Hubbard and probably Heinlein would have loved. I think Crowley tended towards this as well–passages form Liber Al are awful, but at the same time, Liber Oz is a paeon to freedom–although he focused so much on the Augoeides that he frequently reigned in these things. I suspect the Augoeidges might be a synthesis of “thetans” “demons” etc., or a synthesis of something new and other that reigns in these multiplicitious urges, feelings, and thought-forms that pull the human in so many directions; the cinnamon of tipareth unifies suffering and glory and drives the neutral demons into good, etc., etc.

Hopefully this illuminates something.

What, exactly, does the entity get? This is a serious question.

The phrase “His Dark Materials”, which comes from Milton’s poem, is also a reference to the “dark matter” of astrophysics, which plays a central role in the story. In the story “dark matter” is called “dust”, the particles of which [SPOILER ALERT] turn out to be fundamental units of consciousness. In the story, various devices are constructed to communicate with dust, ranging from very complex technologies appearing in the first and second books, to a quite simple device constructed by exigency in the third book. Angels are apparently highly structured organizations of dust.

So, if we accept the central idea that there is such a fundamental unit of consciousness, the “dust” particle, one could think of sigil magic as being a simple device to organize dust and/or communicate with existing dust structures. In fact we are all just complex organizations of dust (”… and to dust you shall return…”) and when we communicate with one another we are just effecting an interaction of dust particles. The techniques of magic are to dust as (perhaps) magnets, capacitors, and wires are to electrons: ways of moving particles around the universe. On the other hand, one could question the ethics of enslaving electrons to do our bidding.

Every time I communicate with you I am attempting to inform or change your opinion. That is, I’m affecting your free will. This comment is an example of my attempt to impinge upon your free will. So, one might also view sigil magic (or other forms of magic) as a means to persuade a discarnate consciousness structure to do something, i.e. no more or less manipulative than a typical human interaction. (Of course, in light of your questions about marketing, some of these can be quite coercive.)