Xk…I hope that this will be both relatively on topic and coherent as well, as it’s something I’ve been pondering for awhile now. It’s a fairly accepted premise that gods will express differing characteristics according to the points in both history and geography from which they manifest; i.e. the variations between the Hellenistic Eris and her Discordian counterpart. But I’ve noticed this principle at work not only in terms of time or place, but also of person.
For example, a good friend of mine and I both have a deep relationships with one particular loa. Several years ago, we were each getting to know Her in our own unique ways. The relationship was easier for me to work with than it was for my friend. What I mean is that my relationship with the power in question was relatively harmonious, while his was fraught with difficulty.
What made the situation even stranger was that his difficult relationship with the loa was negatively impacting his human relationships, particularly the relationship that he had with his then girlfriend. The goddess hated her. With a passion. She was jealous, spiteful and cruel to her, and caused all sorts of problems between my friend and his partner, to the point where said girlfriend just simply refused to spend time at my friend’s place until the loa’s altar and personal things were taken out of the house altogether.
As I said before, at the time this all went down, I was developing a relationship with the same loa. Yet when my friend’s girlfriend met ‘my’ version some months later, they got on wonderfully. It was definitely the same power, but she was behaving in a completely different fashion. Through the medium of my friend, she had been horrible to his girl, but through me she was sweet as honey.
I think that this phenomena had much to do with the not only the personal dynamics among the three of us humans, but also the dimensions of the spiritual relationships that my friend and I were forming with the loa in question…how we perceived her, how we addressed her, how we served her, what we asked of her, and in what tone, what we gave, what we took, our understanding of her mysteries, how those mysteries manifested upon the fabric of our lives and the framework of our personalities…a whole host of variables.
Maya Deren wrote in The Divine Horsemen that “the loa partakes of the nature of the head that bears it. The principle is modified by the person. Just as blood itself is constantly subject to dietary and glandular variations, so the psychic chemistry of these individual carriers, itself affected by internal conditions and external circumstances, in turn affects the very principles which it nourishes”.
So divine manifestation is modified not only by time and place, but by person. And yet the principle retains its archetypal continuity. Limitless variations upon a singular theme…each crafted by the psyche of the devotee.
Fascinating... Anyone have similar experiences? |
