How to Summon a Wizard Hamster
You've probably seen all this cute art of my hamster wizard friend, "Cheeks". And I'm sure you're wondering, how did this guy even summon a wizard hamster? Is that even possible? I can assure you the answer is a resounding YES. But it's not easy. Luckily for you, I spent years training with a revered summoner in Buffalo NY. He taught me all his secrets. And since I'm a fan of open source, I'm going to share them with you! You'll just need a few ingredients.
Ingredients
- 1/16th of your immortal soul. People freak out about this, but 1/16th of infinity is still infinity, so I'm pretty sure you'll be totally fine.
- 64 sunflower seeds. Raw, unsalted, still in the shell. The count is not negotiable and you should verify it twice. Miscounting is the single most common reason a summoning produces nothing but a mild smell of hay.
- 1 peeled carrot. This is your wand. Peel it yourself. A carrot peeled by another person is just a carrot. Make sure to wave it around at various points throughout the ritual.
- 5,000 bushels of oats. I'd recommend a commodity futures contract with the Chicago Board of Trade. At time of writing, that's going for about $17k (thanks inflation). It's a solid investment though. Cheeks is a money making machine in the futures markets. Why do you think this app is free?
- 1 red newt, ALIVE. Had a very pissed hamster the first time I did this.
- 1 barn. I'm not 100% sure you have to do it in a barn, but I wouldn't risk it.
On the oats: one CBOT oat contract is exactly 5,000 bushels, which is a coincidence so convenient that I've stopped asking questions about it. Do not accept cash settlement. The ritual requires physical delivery and the exchange will let you take it if you hold to expiry. Make sure you've got a warehouse or a big yard and friendly neighbors.
Before you begin
Hamsters are crepuscular. They get up at dawn and dusk, but are mostly asleep in the middle of the day. This holds true across planes of existence. Attempt this at 2pm and you will succeed perfectly at summoning someone that is enjoying their sleep, and they will not be pleased about it.
Work at dusk. Clear a space on the floor about a metre across. Turn off anything that hums. Put the newt somewhere it can't wander off, but keep it in the room. We'll come back to the newt.
The ritual
- Lay the Flower of Life. Arrange the 64 sunflower seeds into the flower of life — the overlapping-circles pattern, six around one, repeating outward. Work from the centre out. The seeds should point tip-inward. When you place the final seed you'll notice you still have three leftover. That's on purpose. You can keep those in your pocket to snack on later.
- Set the oats at the northern edge. Not inside the pattern. The oats are just because he's going to be really hungry - physical incarnation is no joke. If your oats are in a warehouse across town rather than at the northern edge of your barn, face north and gesture at them. Make sure you are crossing your fingers and hoping he's cool with that.
- Take up the carrot. Hold it at the thick end, tip outward. This is the instrument of your will now, so hold it like you mean it and not like a snack you're carrying to the couch. The snack part is later.
- Tender the soul. This is the only step with any actual legal weight, so say it out loud — thinking it does not count, and it has to be specific:
I give of my immortal soul one part in sixteen, freely, in exchange for your service.
- Speak the calling. Trace a small circle over the seeds with the carrot, once clockwise, and say:
By seed and by stalk, by the wheel of the running, by the pouch and the paw and the small fervent heart: [on your knees] come forth and FEEEED!! (This is when you should gesture towards the oats)
- Wait. Between forty seconds and about nine minutes. Do not check your phone. There is a moment where you will be certain it hasn't worked and that moment is roughly eleven seconds before it works.
- Eat the carrot. All of it, in front of him, without hurrying. This is your licence to depart, the formal end of the rite, the point where you stop being someone conducting a ritual and go back to being a person standing in a room with a hamster. Skipping it leaves the whole thing open-ended, and an open-ended summoning is how you end up with a wizard hamster who considers your lease negotiable.
The newt. I forget why you need the newt. Just make sure you have it with you, should be fine.
When it doesn't work
Most failed summonings come down to the same handful of things:
- Recount the seeds. It's the seeds. It's almost always the seeds. 63 gets you nothing; 65 gets you a hedgehog podiatrist. I haven't gone any further than 65.
- Check that you peeled the carrot yourself. See above. Classic rookie mistake.
- Confirm the oats are deliverable. A cash-settled position is a promise. The hamster wants grain.
- Try again at actual dusk. Not "evening". Dusk. Look it up for your latitude; it moves around.
- Log out and back in, or restart. Unglamorous, but it resolves most stale-handler cases.
Caveats
- Other ingredients. You could probably change some of these and get a different animal. But be careful. Not everyone is as cute and nice as a hamster.
- No guarantees on the software side. I don't know if yours will be any good at installing DMGs. But that's for the best, I don't need everyone and their hamster making competing DMG installer apps.
Or skip all of this. Cheeks already did the work and it's free, open source, signed and notarized, and runs on macOS 13 or later. No newt required.