Spirits 'n' shit

[Ringtail]

The ease with which pagans and occultists claim to talk with deities troubles me. In the old days it was rare and special for someone to get messages from the gods; you didn't just roll out of bed and be like, Morning Poseidon, hey, do you think I should have eggs or cereal this morning? Much less get a response and believe it was the god of the sea talking (hypothetical example). Not that I have a problem with this, but what's really going on? Did they lower their standards because people aren't willing to go to the lengths they used to? Is it a new aeon thing?

In the psychological model, of course, they're all part of the summoner's mind, or humanity's mind, but in the spirit model? Maybe they're intermediary spirits? Or a lesser instance of the greater entity - this jives with an experience I had a couple years ago, where the thing I'd been talking to for a couple months was like a shadow thrown off by the higher intensity version that I evoked that night.

I kind of like this idea. It gives flexibility. It's like an extension of metamask theory (and I know, I'm probably one of about three people who still calls it that). Just as different cultures interpret archetypes through different masks, the archetypally-energized cultural egregores are then perceived differently by different people or even by the same person at different times. If they then met a higher, "realer" form of the same energy, they would either think they'd been mistaken up to that point or that the entity was revealing more of its true self to them than it had previously. Other people would go their whole lives believing that the lesser form they communicate with is all that's there. But who is to say what's a lesser manifestation of a god/dess and what is a spirit under their control? Identity lines are messy to nonexistent up there, and the only beings that could clarify the issue are notorious storytellers.

The important part, then, is whether the messages someone shares from their version of a being has any bearing on my life. Is this thing you've invoked a part of our mind, or just yours? Unless they say something the person couldn't have known, or give some other evidence, the only standard is that, probably, the deeper the ecstatic state and the more shocking and out of character it is for the medium, the more likely they are to have tapped something transpersonal.

Agree or disagree.

[Tara Flower]

That's what I do all the time, and I'm fickle as well; I've communicated with a series of different ones. I would have to disagree that it is troubling - I think it's great to say, "Morning Poseidon, do you think I should have eggs or cereal?" Could be that more people are doing it due to reading on the internet about strange people like me who do it.


I agree with you that a lot of them are inferior versions: thought forms, or servitors that are acting as intermediaries of communication rather than as servants, or tulpas, or 'subordinate part of...x' Sometimes I think I should break up all my discarded ones in case they are clogging me up, but I don't suppose they clog up the god. The god would just shred it or draw the life out of it- they use statues in temples in exactly the same way.


Since I've been in DKMU I do this with Zalty and Ino.  Zalty swears and makes dirty jokes, and once I went into a church at the mayday festival which they hold every year and he said something to make me keep on laughing in the church. He hasn't asked me to stop making a thought form/tulpa/ subordinate bit of him, he just carries on with the Zalty-ness. I am not sure that it's a proper pirate accent in my mind- sounds a bit Irish or Cornish at times.

[Ringtail]

Right, I didn't mean to say I dislike the informality of communication. What bothers me is how much credit to give to people's claims, and to my own imagination. I'm confused by the apparent shift in the godforms' behavior.

I intentionally left dkmu's egregores out of the OP because they've been approachable since their conception (and for the purposes of this conversation, Zalty doesn't count :P). Do you think all the spirits that people interact with are these intermediaries? How do you tell the difference between a servant and the godform, if they can't be trusted to tell you? Have you seen someone invoke a thing in front of you, and did you give more or less credit to what they said?

[Tara Flower]

I think what is most likely to be true is that all the spirits that people interact with are these intermediaries- maybe it's to protect themselves and us. I haven't seen anyone invoke anything in front of me and I hadn't done invocation and evocation until I was in DKMU, only the thing with intermediaries that we're talking about. As you said it's possible you could do an elaborate evocation according to the ceremonial magic specifications and get a much stronger form.


It seems like we're all possessed nowadays! But with an ability to control it, stand back from it and be objective.At one time people would go crazy and say they were the new prophet for the new age, but the widespread exposure to ideas of Voodoo, Santeria etc. and chaos magic has helped and now people are all, "Well, I'm doing this and enjoying it but I know nothing really."

[spiderocelot]

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and walk likes a duck its probably a duck. I've never had these full blown hallucination or communications happening. very strange things happen? yeah but we still live in the real world. It looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck. A duck doesn't fly far from earth either.  Common sense should tell a reasonable occultist that most the occult world is BS filler and fluff made to create pocket cash. I'm 22 and coming into adulthood has made me realize, "hey, most this magick shit is for girls and manboys!". Sorry the older folks who masturbate to the Qablahblah for 40+ years will never get it.  After a few tries with psychedelics I realized how to "do" magick, and now ritual is just filler.  I noticed that psychedelics were never able to fully displace me from reality like it did the people around me. If magick is psychedelics than some people are just prone to weathering the basic reality before their eyes and creating phantasms.

[Chayote]

In my experience every attempt to contact an entity first is purely illusional anyway ... but can indeed become real, if enough pure will is brought behind it. Kill your 'lust for result' ... and fuck all illusional show that might occur - if you meet a real deity, you will feel it. The difference between human illusion and real Nature's Power. Pure energies, without any kind of 'humanoid' form. That's the way I did it. Together with this kind of "I know"-feeling Ino is able to give you ... I'd recommend her as a help for such operations, perhaps she'd makes it easier to get in contact without any prepossession.


But that's just "my 2 cents" ... personal experience is king  ;)  !

[Chayote]

Tested it myself ... and it worked - much better than without Ino's help. And she helped willingly, although I never tried to contact her that deeply before. So, it really seems worth the test ...  Ino herself is worth it, definitely. I definitely love her ways  ;D 8) .

[MoonMoon]

I take anecdotes of contact with deities with a big ol' shaker of salt. I feel like if you really got in touch with a deity, it would have a big impact of some kind or another. If someone's talking to me about it and I feel no sense of "weight" to the energy behind it (if that makes any sense), I basically disregard it altogether as something they're tossing around in their own mind or as something that is not what it appears to be.


I mean...I guess if it makes them feel better to pretend they got in touch with a deity, no harm no foul?...but my personal paradigm is one where fact-checking is a must, and one is to be constantly vigilant to keep their feet firmly planted on the ground even if their head is way up there in the clouds. I kinda feel 'eh' about the snowflakey way a some will talk about their interactions with deities. Almost like they're so awesome that deity totes wants to hang out with them all day -- meanwhile there's really nothing to show for it. Know what I mean?

[Ringtail]

I asked because I have friends up here, who are more or less classic pagan, who do this invoking thing a lot. At the drop of a hat, really, but they're pretty mature about it. More so than me. Anyway, I went to a thing with them put on by a wiccan group a couple months after posting this which involved a lot of sustained formal-context invocation. I'm sure some of you have been to that sort of thing? And I bought into it because might as well, if I was going to pay the price tag, and got to talk to the godforms several times as part of the program. They had a strong effect on me - one in particular - but I was also funneling a whole lot of belief into them at the time, really treating it like an encounter with a god/dess. I remember looking into one of their eyes was like long green tunnels, but I was also very, very burned out by that point, probably by my own doing. And I saw that other people could also be strongly emotionally affected, or could strongly affect their own emotions by attributing importance to the encounter... and interesting coincidences all around the area where this took place. It's not that wiccans are unable to create magic. But, if their invocations are like my own, there is a gradient, and how much I can attribute what a medium says to another entity will depend on the depth of possession.


I don't know why I was asking here, anyway. The only way I can get real information is by testing. Any ideas on how to get an invoked spirit to say something falsifiable without letting them know what I'm up to?

[Nathanael James]

The potential for self delusion, misunderstanding, and outright lies is this game is huge. As it is in any spiritual method.

I have also wondered at the the people claiming to have these regular, easy communications. I don't trust it.

I have had my own contacts and communications, but they take work and dedication, in my experience anyway. Most contacts I have had are with entities that feel more like archetypes that exist in my own psyche, separate, but still somehow me. Higher entities, but not "gods". That's how they present themselves anyway.

I have only had two communications with something I would call god-like. Both wereuninitiatedand outside my control. And both were purely instructional and one sided. (and brief)

It is so easy to become arrogant and assume your own internal dialogue to be something more. And it is so easy to just get online and outright lie about it, which I feel does the whole community, especially those new to these realities, a terrible and damaging disservice. Like when I go on to dreaming forums and cats be bragging about all the hot celebrities they get to fuck every night in their lucid dreams.

Constant and casual and GENUINE communication with the gods just for shits and giggles? I'm calling bullshit. If I was receiving this kind of communication with this kind of ease, I would seriously question what it is I am communicating with. I would encourage everyone else to do the same

[The Cusp]

You've got Thoughtforms or archetypal structures, which are the bread and butter of magic.

You've got thoughtformm which have become independent and continue to exist beyond their creators.

And then you've got actual entities who came to be independently of us.


If you're chit chatting with something, it's likely self created.  The entities I've encountered are not chatty, they interface directly with your attention, and don't give a crap about your egotistical concerns.  That lack of concern for the ego can make those encounters seem pretty harsh.

I've seen some of the information people have gotten from these entities.  It's usually pretty good, way beyond the level of the person posting about it

[Rasafar]

I'll share a quick story I can give regarding contact. As it went, I was trying to contact the archangel after my middle-namesake, Michael. After meditation, and strong vibration of the name for perhaps a few minutes...I was *startled* to hear a coarse reply, "WHAT?!"...as if I had been going around shouting his name and he was fairly pissed off enough by then to address me.

At that point I freaked...I wasn't expecting that type of direct communication, let alone something that would seem to come from quite outside my head (I figured I was named after him...we're supposed to be buddies or some shit apparently)...but it was enough to startle me from my state of mind and I backpedaled after that.

I think the type of fickle dialogue you're describing is possibly delusional in some sense...yet in another from my Christian days, communication with (what I perceived to be the Divine) was regular and consistent enough to convince me that there was communication happening, one could feel it inside themselves and in the air about them. I knew what needed to be said, who needed what prayed over them, what words to set people free from whatever their minds were wrestling from.

Now, was that big-G God, my higher self, intuition, or reading body language and microexpressions? I don't know for certain, but I think with enough work, relationships can be established and cultivated, but one has to keep in mind where the deities, thoghtforms, and egregores are coming from in their own way. I don't expect something out of an Eastern deity that I might get from a Norse one...if they are beings (or just mental projections), it seems that cultural differences can take place, but there could also be a lot of mask-swapping that goes on as well. Consider Michael the archangel as he would appear to American Indians. I once read an account of someone who had Michael show up in his bear-fur garb coming from a visitation to a native tribe with the "Oops, forgot to change ;)" sort of line.

I've also heard stories about interactions with quite OLD entities, djinn from the middle east say, who are very powerful, and do not fuck around. This is more the type of interaction I would expect with the genuine article. That's not to say that intermediaries don't work as go-betweens...but otherwise it would seem as though the magician is more communicating with a construct they've formulated of an entity, rather than the real deal, save for the elusive full-blown conjuring.