#deity upg

[vesse-moricaleo-lusifero]

I cannot stress this enough:

No matter how "confident" you are in your "UPG", your experiences, your "session", meditation, or the moments by which you have "experienced" something "divine" or spiritual you absolutely must critically examine it before you subscribe to it.

Discernment is absolutely lacking for many people.

There is so much that I see that is very clearly self projection and the practitioners do not realise it. So much I see that is feedback loops. So much that I see that screams "self created". These things matter. But so does your discernment to understand what is Divine and what is maladaptive daydreaming.

[lileirion]

Sometimes being a godspouse is like living a double life. Yes, I have a whole mundane existance going on in the background, I’ve got my goals hobbies and expectations and mundane friends/family I cherish.

Then there’s the whole family in astral, what with kids and my partners. It’s a very busy but fulfilling existence in my opinion.

[the-mortuary-witch]

THINGS I ASSOCIATE WITH MY DEITIES

APHRODITE: makeup, self-care, Lupercalia, kiss marks, 50s and 60s music, the smell of the ocean, white birds, vanilla or cherry blossom scented perfume, strawberry pocky, lacy and frilly things, roses, fairies, rom-coms, pastel colours (especially pink and light blue), pink moon, flower crowns, strawberry blonde hair, the number five, pink lemonade, music boxes, classical music, picnics, ballet, and Friday.

ASMODEUS: card games, money, casinos, gambling, fire, Lupercalia, musky and seductive cologne, the number three, dice, rubies, blood moon, the colour red, every Friday the 13th, cats, pineapple, ornate swords, whiskey, organ music, pentagrams, and Friday.

FREYJA: ladybugs, battle scars, full and new moons, cats, motherhood, Friday, sunflowers, Mother’s Day, the numbers nine and 12, freshly watered flowers, red lipstick, menstruation, daisies, the colours gold and yellow, orgasms, vintage jewelry, strawberries, floral tea, apples, and self defence.

HADES: dark weather, blood moon, skulls and bones, keys, whiskey, cloudy days, dark crystals, Monday, black foods, the number three, cemeteries and graveyards, musk, bats, dogs, musky cologne, hellhounds, coffins, grave imagery, Halloween/Samhain, coins, and darkness.

HECATE: taxidermy, the numbers three and 13, phases of the moon, keys, moonstone, Monday, the colours black and grey, moths, full and new moons, Halloween/Samhain, black cats, olives, crows, dogs, ghosts, veils, dark chocolate, and garlic.

HEL: goth music, darkness, Halloween/Samhain, skulls and bones, night blooming flowers, dark crystals, Monday, the numbers nine and 13, horror artwork, mist, crows and ravens, hellhounds, bone hunting, gothic architecture, bats, mold, cemeteries and graveyards, and blood.

LOKI: sweet foods and drinks, April Fool’s Day, knives and daggers, foxes, spiced rum, kids toys, the colour green, Saturday, mistletoe, red hair, fire, masks, smiling, board games, pranks, the numbers four and 13, jokes, laughter, 13th of each month, and doodling.

LILITH: seductive perfume, Victoria’s Secret, red wine, apples, Friday, dark chocolate, snakes, motherhood, black cats, the numbers three and seven, pentagrams, blood, owls, crescent moons, the colour purple, menstruation, horror artwork, orgasms, red or dark coloured roses, clay, and fancy jewelry.

PERSEPHONE: aesthetic Pinterest boards, the smell of spring, deer, lipstick, Monday, pomegranates, bats, pink moon, menstruation, freshly watered flowers, bone divination, picnics, the colour pink, birds (mainly doves and songbirds), floral tea, animal bones, spring water, singing, the number three, planting flowers, gardening, and flower crowns.

[mischievous-heretic]

Doing godspousing, spirit work or deity work?

Then you need spiritual discernment. It's an essential tool to help prevent making stuff up, and falling prey to fantasies or projections.

(Spoiler: I am a godspouse, and have used discernment on a daily basis for years. This post isn't about hating godspouses. It's about how discernment can benefit many different spiritual practices. Godspousing is just one of those.)

What Is Discernment?

You won't find a spiritual definition in a secular dictionary, and discernment has more than one meaning in pagan spiritual communities.

However, a commonly used definition for spiritual discernment can be summarized as:

"a process for examining spiritual experiences, to see which parts of them came from your mind or random life circumstances, or was generated by a god or spirit"

Discernment involves observation, self-inquiry, and researching your gods and spirits. It's mental, emotional and spiritual labor, so...

Why Use Discernment?

There's no pretty answer to that, sorry!

If you don't use discernment, it's likely you'll eventually struggle with self-deception in your spiritual practice.

How does that develop? Here's the general process...

*If you're human, then you have a subconscious mind. Psychologists disagree on the exact percentage, but it's estimated that somewhere between 90-95% of your brain operates below your conscious awareness.

*Your subconscious mind absorbs everything you experience in life. Movies and TV shows you watched, social media and books you read, music you like, how your parents and other people treated you, and basically every other thing you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled or touched creates subconscious input.

*Based on your specific life experience, the subconscious mind tries to make sense of whatever you encounter to help you survive. It notices relational patterns, and creates beliefs about how the world works, biases, expectations for how people should treat you, thinking patterns, opinions, attitudes, and other internal ideas. This creates a kind of mental "lens" through which you view the world.

*As an adult, you automatically interact with others through that subconscious lens, without noticing it exists. Everything people, gods, and spirits say or do is interpreted through your lens.

*Problem is... your mental lens isn't always accurate. It's skewed to match your life experiences. Grow up with abuse? Now you'll subconsciously expect everyone to abuse you, even if your gods and spirits are kind. Grow up with kindness? You'll default to expecting that.

*You see, the subconscious mind doesn't like change at all! It finds familiar patterns most comfortable, even if they are abusive or painful. So your brain will edit your spiritual experiences to maintain your mental lens, and your subconscious expectations of how relationships should work. Probably without you noticing.

*Add all the above together and Bingo! You've just deceived yourself without even knowing it. A god or spirit could say something that clashes with your mental lens and... if you aren't using spiritual discernment to observe your subconscious, it might edit or misinterpret your spiritual experience to match your mental lens. And you won't even see it.

Now you'll swear that a particular spiritual experience meant one thing when the god or spirit may have meant something else entirely, without noticing this discrepancy.

Why?

Because self-deception is comfortable.

It creates a picture that looks familiar. It will match what you subconsciously want or expect.

Examples of Self-deception

If you do deity work, are you hoping a certain god will come calling? Because maybe your friends work with that deity and you feel left out? Self-deception and the power of suggestion can make you think that's happening, when it isn't actually true.

Maybe you do spirit work and fear being abused by some demon? Sure enough, it happens! Sadly that might be the product of self-deception and projection, but who's counting? Your subconscious is getting its expectations fulfilled.

Were you hoping for a sweet, loving godspousing relationship? Self-deception and romantic fantasies to the rescue! This is possible, much as I hate to say it.

Obviously not every deity worker, spirit worker, or godspouse is suffering from self-deception.

Those are just potential examples of how it might happen, so you can see how self-deception will morph to fit your subconscious mental lens as needed. There are countless other ways it could show up.

How Does Discernment Help?

Discernment shoves you out of your mental comfort zone.

It encourages you to examine everything you think you know about your life experiences, your subconscious mind and its mental lens, your gods and spirits, and ultimately your spiritual path.

Discernment has you observe your mundane life, and notice the everyday circumstances your subconscious mind is absorbing. Are any of those showing up in your spiritual experiences?

For example, if it's late summer and you're dreaming of sunflowers, chances are that's not a sign from Apollo. It's merely the time of year influencing your dreams. Your subconscious mind is seeing sunflowers everywhere and populating them into your dreams. Entirely normal, but not Apollo.

Discernment requires examining your subconscious, and digging into what it contains. Do you see any familiar patterns in your spiritual experiences?

Now you must be very honest, and dissect your biases, motives, desires, opinions, thinking patterns, logical fallacies, expectations, worldview, and everything else. Know yourself! So you can know what isn't you, and might therefore be a god or spirit talking.

This part of discernment is where trauma work sometimes exists. You might discover you fear abandonment, judgment, criticism, or many other things from past abuse. Have courage and do that trauma work, even when it's not fun.

Look for projections here too. Are you assuming a god or spirit is gonna treat you like your abusive ex did? Pay close attention to that, even if it's uncomfortable.

Examine your subconscious.

Unearth the mental lens it created for you, based on your life experiences. Notice how out of date your subconscious assumptions about relationships might be now, as an adult.

Replace any unhealthy beliefs, opinions, biases, or expectations about how relationships should work with healthy ones. This is uncomfortable work, but well-applied discernment will expose what needs fixing in you.

Discernment involves researching your gods and spirits, looking carefully at who they are historically. Do you see parallels between your spiritual experiences and their lore?

Is there a reasonable basis to assume the entities you're interacting with are who you think they are?

Don't be satisfied with what random internet strangers think about your gods and spirits. That's usually some mixture of hearsay and UPG, and how much do you trust other people's discernment or lack thereof?

Dig into primary sources.

If you're upset by a god or spirit's lore (Zeus anyone?), research the culture they are associated with. Try to understand how the ancients viewed the world, and their gods and spirits. Why did they think that god was admirable? What did their cultural lens look like? Take a look, even if you disagree with it.

As you research, try to think in symbols. Lore is rarely written as literal historical events, so don't read it that way. What do the symbols represent? Death could mean transformation. Rain could symbolize fertility. Think a little sideways and read between the lines.

What's the result of all this inquiry?

By now, you can probably pinpoint which parts of your spiritual experience were generated by your subconscious mind editing things to fit your mental lens, and which parts might have genuinely come from your gods and spirits.

With that information, what do you do next?

Make a decision about how much of your spiritual experience to incorporate into your practice, and how much to discard as mental white noise.

Zooming way out, here's a summary of...

My Discernment Process

I take every spiritual experience through this process before incorporating it into my practice, and I recommend you do the same.

*You have an experience you think is spiritual.

*Examine your mundane life circumstances. How much of that is your subconscious mind populating into your spiritual experience? Discard those parts.

*Examine your subconscious mind. How much of your inner stuff is being populated into your spiritual experience without your awareness? Be honest with yourself, and discard those parts of your experience.

*Examine your gods and spirits. Is their behavior in your experience congruent with their lore? Is this something they would do? If not, discard those parts of your experience.

*Examine the remaining parts of your spiritual experience. Do they make sense to you as spiritual truth? If not, place on your mental Maybe shelf and ask for a sign as confirmation. If so, incorporate them into your spiritual practice and move forward.

Final tips...

Be exceedingly honest with yourself during the discernment process. Ruthlessly apply discernment to every single spiritual experience. No exceptions!

You will screw up occasionally because you are human. That's normal and okay. A little embarrassment is better than self-deception any day.

Discernment is not a course you graduate from, because your subconscious mind is continually absorbing new information, generating ideas based on that input, then populating that into your spiritual experiences. It's what brains do.

Therefore, honing discernment is a lifelong task. You wanna be a decently skilled deity worker, spirit worker or godspouse? Get used to doing the work of discernment as needed.

[homewardskies]

Deities For Beginners

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Okay... I've been seeing a lot of misinformation and misconceptions regarding deities, so I'd like to contribute a little bit to the conversation. Fyi, this is from the perspective of a polytheist, not a witch!

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

"How do I talk to the Gods/how do I start working with them/how do I ask to work with them?"

Honestly, you don't know, and you don't need to. A lot of people start out obsessed with direct communication and instant gratification. All you need is intention: start praying. Paganism is about building connections and relationships. Those take time. You will learn your Gods. You don't need them to magically manifest in front of you, and I honestly don't recommend relying solely on divination to "talk" to them, at least until you have enough experience to discern actual interactions from nothing at all.

"Is [insert God] mad at me?"

Have you caused terrible harm to someone intentionally? Have you shown unprecedented levels of hubris? No? Then they aren't. This question is usually a result of the questions from earlier. Just because you don't feel them during your first ritual, or life throws something at you, does not mean the ancient forces of the universe have it out for you. Take your time, recenter yourself, and remember that the Gods hear you and they are there.

"Oh you worship [insert God]? Aren't they...evil?"

No! Hope that helps! Jk jk. The myths are stories that allow us some degree of historical context for how the original practitioners viewed the Gods and what their practice was like. Through their cultural lens, we get a decent picture of what the Gods are like. However, that does not make the myths literal depictions of the Gods, and it's actually a major red flag to treat them as such.

"Are all the Gods just the same few Gods viewed differently by different people?"

So, this is the soft vs. hard polytheism question, and honestly, I personally find soft polytheism (all pantheons are the same God/few Gods in different forms) to be a bit problematic at times. Are Wodin and Odin the same? Yeah, they share a common origin. Are Zeus and Odin the same? No, and you really can't argue that.

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Anyways. These are some of the more common questions I'd like to answer. I would love to elaborate if needed! Also, if anyone has other questions, I'll answer to the best of my ability.

[grimasrunecasting]

Fenrir and Tyr don’t feel at odds to me, at least not in the way many people may assume.

To me, they are the sides of the same coin. Both representing the same thing, just in different ways.

Fenrir’s binding and betrayal is not just about oath breaking but the loss of the social contract and the rage that wells up from it, to me at least. Depending on the telling of the tale, Fenrir can come across as already suspicious that the Aesir are going to trick him and thus it is why he asks for Tyr’s battle hand. Because he senses something afoot. And depending on the telling, Tyr readily accepts the loss of his hand. He knows that which must be done and to do so requires not only sacrifice but consequence of his actions. The Aesir trick Fenrir into being bound, Tyr offers his hand in recompense, and Fenrir rages.

While in a previous post I noted the consequence and fairness of Tyr losing his hand in order to bind Fenrir, we can’t overlook the trickery in the first place. Fenrir was only viewed as a threat because Odin had visioned it, but in turn trying to prevent Fenrir from becoming a foe Odin seals his fate by tricking Fenrir into being bound.

Maybe it’s just the 3 am thoughts, but Tyr and Fenrir feel like two sides of the social contract conundrum.

[pixxl-sunsets]

people talk about apollo's dodgeball of prophecy but they don't talk about hermes's dodgeball of Sudden Loud Message

(this meme is my attempt to combat said seriousness)

[iridescent-ruins]

Hermes of the in-betweens

what i had felt for a long time, but came to realise only recently;

Hermes inhabits the undefinable, foggy, transitory spaces. The explosive moments where boundaries clash, the margins, the no-man’s lands where rules don’t apply because wait, nobody’s supposed to be here! He lives in the blurred landscapes behind the windows of a moving train, half-incorporeal, somehow distinct from their still counterparts. Rests by the highway even though there’s nothing here but fields for miles on end. He strums and sings with the people forgotten by the world, who don’t even legally exist but claw out a space for themselves still. He’s in the mental stumble when you’re figuring out how to talk to someone without knowing their language, ragged edges, metal scratching, two cultural machines grinding against each other until they discover they’re both human. He’s in the liminal that indicates change, the cracks in the system where weeds still grow, the shapes formed by what we built around them. Hermes is a dimensional god, a spatial god, and he’s as much the boundaries as the places in between them.