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So my question here is, what factors influence that supposed difference - between a deity who's apparently had lot of continuous direct-contact type interaction and one that hasn't?
Dude, I really don't know!
I have no idea what these consciousnesses consist of, so to speak, so I don't really know if they could be said to 'learn', or if the differences I've experienced were born entirely out of my own expectations. All I can do is relay what I've experienced and present some speculation on it.
Bear in mind I've only been doing the whole direct contact thing since late April last year*, and I've limited my interactions to those beings who seemed to approach me rather than proactively seeking to form relationships. (By approached me, I'm talking about vivid dreams, visions, heavy synchronicity, and spontaneous contact.) So, small sample, very short timeframe.
So far I've interacted with a few members of Team Norse, plus Eleggua**. I'd say that of all of them, Eleggua felt the most... up-to-date, in a way. There was still a kind of chasm there, because I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to the Orisha, but the divide didn't seem that vast really. It was as if Eleggua knew me somehow, in the sense of knowing the kind of person He was dealing with, the resources I was likely to have available, the 'language' I was most likely to understand. There was a sense of having the dialogue simplified for my benefit, of allowances being made.
Working with the more 'popular' Norse gods has been different. Usually communication there is fairly easy, as these things go, but sometimes it's as if I'm expected to have a body of lore to hand that I just don't. Most of the time they use methods of communication that are appropriate to my situation, but there are many odd lapses.
There's been a couple of instances of verbal communication in some language I don't speak--a variant of Old Norse, I assume. The imagery that comes through is often hard to interpret: symbols that might have been immediately recognisable at one time but are unknown to me, and have to be researched later. Other things, natural phenomena that look loaded with meaning but which I can't understand. There's a sense that great tracts of information are just going straight over my head at times.
And then there's the really lost Gods, the ones who've been relegated to a name or a brief description in lore, if that--Mordgud, for example, who just sort of jumped me one night. I wrote a post about working with Mordgud here.
I don't properly understand what was happening there, although I've offered my own interpretation. The thing that really sticks with me about that experience was the powerful feeling that there was this parcel of assumptions on Her part, as if She's mistaken me for someone. I got a very clear sense that She was expecting to find a group of people, maybe a sort of communal dwelling, and that these people would be expecting Her and would be ready to interact. it felt like She was genuinely bewildered to realise that this was not the case.
My theory is that behind those few lines of lore there's the memory of some psychopomp Goddess, someone who might have been well-known and revered in Her own time, and who had a particular kind of worship associated with Her. This is pure speculation, of course but it's all I can come up with. I certainly wasn't expecting to get a visit from Her; in fact, I didn't recognise Her name right off and had to think for a while before I remembered reading it.
To have any hope of being able to answer that earlier question I'd have to do a lot more work involving many different beings: old Gods who've been left unworshipped, old Gods who've been worshipped continuously up to the present day, more 'novel' beings who are worshipped today. At some point I'd like to work with Discordia!Eris, say for six months or so, and compare that experience with working with Loki. They seem to share a lot of the same mysteries so there should be at least some basis for comparisom between them.
(Of course, one could argue that Loki is also a novel deity since we have no record of Loki-worship in history. But there ya go.)
*I have had an ancestor harrow for rather longer than that, and there's also a couple of nice people that've been around for a few years who claim to be my guides. But the work I do with these guys feels very different.
**I don't know why Eleggua. My interpretation is that He saw me hanging around on His turf with booze and tobacco, and decided to glom His fair share. |
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