Best. Ritual. Scheduling. EVER

[baxil]

Time to close the books on Pcon 2010, which means sharing the awesome and never-before-told Sunday evening anecdotes!

1: I chose that day to wear my Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt. Although I did not achieve spiritual enlightenment, I did procure the following unsolicited testimonial: "The 3-Wolf Moon T-shirt is only surpassed in manliness by

Comments

[paka]

I'm with you on 2) there. Pretty much the only in-person guidance I ever had about this animism stuff (and my "mentor" who wasn't really, may have been completely hokey - so take it with a little skepticism) was that basically, the other spirits out there are, first and foremost, people. Treat them like you'd treat anyone human you talk to; don't ask them for help if it's not something they can do, really don't ask them for help if it's not something they're okay with, and don't just blankly assume that they're going to be thrilled to help you out.

[baxil]

((Vigorous nodding.))

I should be careful to specify that this isn't a universal thing. I/we work with spirits, which is to say, people like us who happen to be disembodied, but there are definitely Other Things out there that should be approached on their own terms; totems/archetypes/gods do work on a different level and the people who work with them in those other ways are doing nothing at all wrong.

[paka]

Yeah, but I just find it kind of alien on a... I guess, cultural level.

For whatever reason, I tend to regard spirits and whatever as basically family; these are theoretically people who can be there for you provided you don't skeeve them off, they do like it when you treat them with respect, and although very few of them are your actual friends, some of them are your friends. I guess that puts my attitude somewhere closer to yours than to the thing I was raised with and which kinda bugs me in some of the pagan community, where an external god is a big adult authority, but spirits are little bitty guys you can just randomly use. Does that make any sense?

[baxil]

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Actually, that reminds me of one of my rants about DJ Conway's "Dragon Magick" (which is a lot of mythological fluff wrapped around a core of some wannabe new-age Goetic evocation). As one of the ostensible targets of her summoning rituals I find the whole foofaraw amusing and a wee bit insulting. "Hi, I'm a mighty dragon (rawr!) and I have nothing better to do than kick around in the aether until some doof finds a pointy piece of metal, a stick, an oversized penny, and a glass of water and reads some prepackaged flattery amid strangely scented candles! Deary me, I think I might just faint from the awesome!"

Now, as far as I'm concerned, you can have a fruitful business relationship with spirits. "Hey fella. You do this thing for me, I feed you some energy and acknowledge your niftiness, then we each run off again and do our thing. Deal?" But that doesn't generally work as a long-term relationship, and it doesn't work unless it benefits everyone. Any ritual that includes, e.g., trapping someone in a

[paka]

Gods are sort of scary to me - I think because of growing up in the south, and kind of getting the fundamentalist Christian version of deity, where a god is something big and potentially hostile and whose decisions can't be questioned. I feel like as soon as something's named A GOD, you have to seriously be ultra super careful around them. It's weird - any river, and especially the ocean for instance, has the ability to turn very deadly in an instant, and yet they seem friendly enough and they're certainly worth honoring. So it's nothing connected to them; it's about my experience with adult types as a kid.

What's weird is actually being around people horsing deity types, they seem actually like pretty okay people. I don't hate them, and even the really scary guys, you can still see why they'd be that way. I've had some really humbling experience with godheads, which make them less hostile seeming. So you'd think I'd be more okay with deities...

... and I'm going to quit here because I sound like a real kook.