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Nothing you have written so far really has the ring of the experiential about it
I should qualify that statement. Generally, when someone has direct personal experience of deity work, you can pick that up just from the way in which they talk and write about those encounters. It shows through in how they discuss the subject. They will tend to contribute ideas and insights that are their own, arising from something they have done, and you will be able to tell that from how they discuss it. While they may not divulge the actual details of their practice, it will be apparent that they are talking about a core experience that *they* have had themselves.
You conspicuously don't do this. You don't really seem to be bringing anything to the table that looks as if it has arisen from your own work, and as pointed out above, all of the ideas you are forwarding could have been taken wholesale from The Invisibles or Pop Magic and simply regurgitated on this thread in occasional BLOCK CAPITALS for emphasis. When called upon to contribute something beyond this reheated chaos magic doctrine, something that actually appears to be drawn from your own encounters with both fictional and historical/cultural entities, you immediatly clam up, get defensive, and perform cartwheels in order to evade the issue. None of which really creates the impression that you are basing your ideas on your own solid long-term experience of both modes of entity, which in turn makes it very difficult for me to attribute any value to what you have to say on the subject.
I would be interested to hear about someone's longterm and committed relationships with fictional deities, in order to compare that with how deity work seems to function in traditions such as Vodou. However I have yet to encounter a single person who has reported any experiences of working with pop culture entities that appears to any degree comparable to what it is like working with the Lwa, or the Norse, or whoever. It really seems to be two different yet related things, as far as I can tell, based on both my own experiences and the various first hand accounts I have read. I've encountered plenty of people who have done a one-off fly-by-night ritual for Batman or Superman, or worked with them for a few weeks, or who do a ritual based around them once every few months, and get results. I'm not disputing that as I've experienced it myself. But I have never encountered anyone who has a permanent altar to their pop culture entity, speaks to them everyday, makes big all night services for them with drums and dancing, has certain obligations to them they must observe, is learning a system of magic directly from them, and regularly has experiences that go against their expectations. All of this is characteristic of deity work, as I understand it, and I've never got that from pop culture entity work myself or come across another person that has.
That last point is perhaps the most important. Work with the Lwa continually produces experiences that go against expectation. I may have a comfortable routine for establishing communication, but once the connection is open, it is very much like conversing with another complex living personality, with a history, an agenda, likes, dislikes, and so on. I've never personally got that same degree of complexity out of fictional entities. They can be an archetypal window on a larger mystery, but there doesn't seem to be enough depth there to sustain a lifetime of devotion. I've also found that fictional entities tend to be limited by the parameters of the fictional works they have been extracted from. It's difficult to have a relationship with Cthulhu, as a raw elemental force, without Lovecraft and his weird hang-ups getting in the way on some level. That's really what made me move away from that stuff. I felt that I was definitely connecting to *something* through the fictional mask, but that mask was itself limiting my ability to access what was behind it. I've found the Vodou lens on the mysteries a lot more flexible as, for one thing, there isn't a core text that demarcates the operating parameters of entity.
Another key point may be that a lot of fictional characters such as Buffy, Yoda, Al Swearengen, etc, may reflect certain archetypes (the hunter, the wise man, the gangster, respectively) but they are not deities in the context of the fictional work they exist within - so it always feels a bit jarring to extract them from that and expect them to have the attributes and power of deities in our world. If you extracted her from her fictional world, why would Buffy be able to get something done for you? The logic, or LOGIC if you like, doesn't seem to follow. Why would Yoda have deity level powers in our world that he doesn't have in the fictional world he belongs in? What does he actually do for you? Teach you to levitate X-Wing Fighters? Speak in linguistically peculiar platitudes? What you tend to find with historical/cultural deities, is that they possess deity level power, have a specific remit and area of operation, and possess their own magic that they can teach you if you have cultivated a deep enough relationship with them to warrant being taught. Ghede can teach you complex stuff about working with the spirits of the dead that isn't in any book, and through the course of a longterm relationship, you gradually get to learn some of that and develop as a magician as a result of that relationship. I've never once encountered someone who works with pop culture entities who has reported a lifetime relationship with those deities that functions in this way, with a distinct learning curve and obligations on both sides. The parameters of pop culture deity work tend to be more along the lines of "do a ritual for The Flash, beat the rush hour traffic", which is not quite the same process as what I'm describing. |
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