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Again, could you please attempt to substantiate your ideas with examples of how you have arrived at these ideas in the course of your practice, because none of what you have to say on this subject has the ring of experiential authenticity to it. That is a problem for further discussion, because at the moment it feels as if you are talking about "ideas" you have come up with that sound plausible to you, whereas I'm very specifically talking about a practice that I live and breathe every day. Have you put in the hours? Are you speaking from direct personal experience of what you are talking about?
Lwa is as fictional as Darth Vader. One day, there was a man who said "Lwa exists", and set about describing that entity. One day, there was a man who said "Darth Vader exists", and he set about describing that entity.
It would probably help if you were to familiarise yourself with what the term Lwa actually refers to, before you make sweeping statements about the concept. But that aside, one day George Lucas invented the character of Darth Vader for his film, something about that character resonated deeply with a lot of people, probably because it taps into something quite primal and archetypal. People love Star Wars, go to conventions, dress up as Vader and buy toys and boxsets. That's about the extent of it.
No individual sat down on a Sunday afternoon with a packet of biscuits and came up with the idea of Ghede. He emerged organically out of a culture, and is a means by which that culture attempts to relate to the ancestors, the dead, life, death, sexuality and other crucial stuff of our experience. He's not a fictional character invented for recreational entertainment. He's a means of relating to and interacting with the really important stuff of our existence, the essentials of life and death, and he has been this for generations and generations of people. In a way that Spiderman or Buffy really isn't and hasn't and is unlikely to. If you start up a conversation with Buffy, you don't tap into the same deep well spring of history and mystery. There's not really very much on the other end of the line. Even within her own cosmology, she isn't really set up to function in this way. Why would you call on her? What can she help with? Cheerleading tips? Vampire slaying? With the Lwa, it's really all about learning from them, learning more about their mystery, learning of their magic. You put in the hours, and it begins to unfold for you. I've been doing this stuff for years and it feels as if I've still only scratched the surface of what is there. I can't really say I've had anything like the same experience working with fictional characters.
It's difficult to really communicate the difference to you, because I would hazard a guess that you haven't actually done a great deal of deity work yourself, so there isn't a commonality of experience. You have made up your mind that deities are fictional characters, and therefore your logic follows that there is no discernable difference between deities and all other fictional characters. I'm not really likely to convince you otherwise if you have not personally experienced deity in a way that is quite unlike fiction - and rightly so. I'm just a disembodied voice on the internet, why should you take my word for it. I would however, suggest that your practice may be enriched if you put what you think you already know on hold and experiment in this feild with a more flexible and open mind as to the nature of what is taking place.
If you think Superman is merely a mask for Jesus, then surely Jesus is just a mask for Osiris, Krishna, or Adonis! If you think Jesus is just a mask for Osiris, then surely Osiris is just a mask for another proto-god even before him!
I don't think Superman is a mask for Jesus. However, every word you put down does seem to demonstrate a total absence of direct personal experience of any of the deities you make reference to. Have you spent time - as in years - working with these Gods? As a rule, I would say that anyone who merrily equates deities based on similarity of attribute has not done very much work with deities. Their personalities are very different and very specific. There is certainly a commonality of mystery behind the deities Oshun, Erzulie Freda, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Babalon, Isis and so on, but in practical terms, they are very different ladies. The differences are sometimes more important than the similarities, and you're dealing with something more akin to points on a spectrum of human experience.
I'll also add here that the Guardians of the Universe, from DC Comics, have been around since the beginning of time.
Except they haven't. They've been around since maybe the 1960s or 1970s when some comics writer invented them. There isn't a history of traffic there, entire cultures haven't been working with them as deities for thousands of years, and its this history of traffic that seems to shape the potency and 'living' qualities of actual deities. People haven't prayed to the Guardians of the Universe to put a meal on their table, nobody has started a righteous revolution in their name, nobody has dedicated their lives to their service and lived and breathed their mysteries with their every waking moment. This is the stuff that matters, and it's what seems to make a qualitative difference between these two modes of entity.
your logic breaks down upon close examination
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