Devoured by Flame

An acronym that started going around the wider heathen community in the early days of growing reconstructionist traditions is UPG (unverified personal gnosis). It was thought to separate common thoughts, opinions, and experiences from well-known facts about the Gods. If the UPG is then shared, it can become Shared Personal Gnosis (SPG).  If the SPG becomes verified through other means, it can then become Verified Personal Gnosis which is then held higher than all of the UPG and SPG combined.

However, none of these really have any great importance if, when reading the source material, we tend to develop our own biases, we are already destroying the whole point of what this alleged “verification” of experiences is. Once a community forms a bias around a myth or a God, they tend to usually stick to it and make sure every experience falls into those biased categories whether they are consciously doing it or not. 

A category and subtext for a myth either literally or used as an analogy for an experience is framed by the wider opinions of the day.

An argument about the Gods changing according to the times feels like a way to excuse for poor praxis on the part of the westernized world in polytheistic beliefs. Are the Gods “changing to the times” or are our beliefs destroying what the Gods’ values have been this whole time?

It is true that the Gods are living and breathing entities with their own problems, biases, and judgments. They have their own ideas for what is right and what is wrong and base their actions on this bias because that’s what makes the Gods who They are. We are a product of the Gods in our own way because we frame everything around what we experience to be true and shape the world around that experience and make sense of the world around us.

However, the problem with our biases these days is that so few people tend to pick apart their bias and why they have it to begin with.

The Gods are perfect in the way that They are unchanging in their values and behavior. Unlike the Gods, humans can interpret their experiences based off of their values and create values based on experiences. We change far more than the Gods ever have – and the Gods would need to be a part of this world to change with us and know what it means to be within this society whether it’s good or not.

However, we can’t get past our own noses to even expose the Gods to humanity because we cannot see Them as part of our world or our own nature. So we do not change with the Gods because the Gods are so far removed from humanity at this point and any attempts to bring Them closer to us have been deterred by Christianized thinking and westernized religious patterns.

All of this brings me back to the way that UPG deters any forward motion in making sense of the Gods in this world. If our own biased opinions are shaping our interpretation of the myths and source material and then creating a bias on our experiences, we are then sucked into a vortex of what is right and wrong and completely shut ourselves from having legitimate experiences at all.

If we can’t realize that the way the Gods were worshiped long ago will never be be fully realized and whatever practices of those days will never be truly meaningful for us today, then we aren’t going to get anywhere in our relationships with the Gods and we will be doomed to repeat the same thing over and over again.

So many people turn away from polytheism because it gets stale. They leave, get cynical, or pessimistic because they can’t understand that in order to get past this circle of repetition, they need to leave what they think they know behind. So many authors, big name pagans, and other long-standing figureheads disappear into the aether because their content gets dull, repetitive, and dry. 

I think it’s time for us to step outside of the way we go about framing the Gods and trying to assert some authority over others’ experiences and how they relate to a culture that has been dead for thousands of years. We have evidence to show how the Divine have been thought about in other polytheist cultures that all have unbroken traditions – all of which inevitably ended up being colored by Abrahamic religion whether it became realized or not. 

The consequence of not doing this could be the fact that this religion and religious practice could be dead in the water in a matter of decades. If no new thinking becomes available, any attempts to restore the old Gods and create new practices will be done for and the old Gods might go completely ignored in the future. 

If we truly want the Gods to be a part of our pagan ways, we need to reconsider how we go about thinking of Them. We cannot ignore the fact that we are so deeply embedded in cynicism and old patterns of enlightened thinking that we become either too atheist to even pursue a religious platform at all or when we do, we fizzle out and destroy any possibility of moving forward.

The issue is the problematic people who tend to get away with this sort of thing tend to also be barked down off the ledge and we swing the opposite way of them. Those who came before and dabbled in the more esoteric pursuits of Divine relationships have often been scoffed at and belittled by any of the reconstructionists at the time. The moral ambiguity of their placement of ideals over the Divine have also been a cause for their own destruction. 

Anything that these people might have done becomes “canceled” and thought to be inappropriate based on their behavior. Any other progress is then done on the outskirts of the majority and never to be talked about in a serious way again without strict measures that we think should be obligated protection as if the Divine are here to harm us in the same way those people did.

The UPG to Egregore Pipeline

UPG also has the capacity to create egregores around certain Deities. We are prone to our own biases which create an energetic void that devotees get lost in. We tend to not be able to tell right from wrong and gaslight our own experiences because they do not fit with what the wider community tends to believe whether we want to admit it or not. 

Shame, guilt, and compliance all tend to make UPG become the problem that it is today and the Gods – who do not shift with these UPG “progressive ideas” – then become irrelevant to the follower and They are left ignored and not capable of reaching the people that They want to be reaching. They can only develop ideas based around the only context from which we behave within and if they are no longer a part of that context can they no longer reach the humans They are wanting to reach.

We may think that the Gods are capable of reaching us wherever and however because they are incredible and have few limits, but even in a normal human relationship, we are only ever able to see another person for how we know them to be. If that knowledge is fully submerged in context that has nothing to do with that actual person, our relationship and any communications we might otherwise share would be forever destroyed. We cannot see what They would show us if we are blinded by our own biases and distrust in our own associations. 

Imposters and Trickster spirits

A popular topic that’s often brought into polytheist spaces is the question about how we are supposed to tell the difference between an imposter, trickster spirits, and sock puppets. 

I’m going to start by saying it is impossible for a spirit to behave as a Deity. A Deity, once you are aware of what Their energy feels like, cannot be made up for by a trickster spirit or imposter. It’s simply impossible. They are too immense of an energy, too big to ever be considered to be an imposter or a substitute. 

As a personal note, readers of this blog know that I primarily am devoted and work with Loki. Loki, for those who do not know, is widely regarded as being difficult to discern because He tends to go around in circles and mislead people. The many times I thought I had been tricked by an imposter turned out to be Him – I just did not have the context to make sense of this behavior because the community I was in told me that He did not behave in that way. A lot of the issues I had in my relationship and distrust in Him would not have happened had I known to trust my own instincts that told me it was Him all along instead of going off of what other people were saying.

However, because people use fear tactics to feel the same about trickster entities and imposters, we tend to ignore our instincts and listen to our fear instead. Our fear overpowers our discernment and overpowers what we know to be true and swallows up any known experience we could have had by distorting it and proving it to be wrong. 

Imposters and “trickster spirits” that are acting as Deities don’t exist. It’s humans who feel like they know how the Divine operates and impose their reality and misleading interpretations on other people who make us think that these are what is actually going on.

Sock Puppets

On the flip side, once we are so involved with our own thinking, sock puppets are actually an issue we have. Once we have found ourselves to be so engulfed in our ways of thinking, that anything outside of the things we find to be comforting are false, we tend to create sock puppets.

Sock puppets can be mistaken for Deities by people who are incapable of having their own discernment between energies of our own passions and the energy of the Divine. Those who make up these things in their head tend to be mislead by those who believe there are such a thing as imposters and trickster spirits who impersonate Gods. This then creates a rabbit hole wherein there is no solution for the practitioner unless they are willing to give up their comfortable little hole in lieu of actual experience which is intimidating and “wrong” feeling. 

Because the energy that surrounds the sock puppet is of our own making and tends to weaken the longer the sock puppet occupies the space the Deity once had, we can no longer decide for ourselves which is the Deity and which is our own thought process unless the practitioner decides on their own that they’ve been lost in repetitive behavior and echo chambers of their own creation.

The Divine as Catalysts

All Deities, regardless of whether they are known for it or not, are the antithesis to stagnancy. A telltale sign of an experience with a Deity, no matter how frequent or infrequent they can be, is that your perceptions shift. Frequent interactions with a Deity can lead you to a point in your life where the life and time before Them can seem like a distant memory even if it had only been a couple months since the initial experience. Infrequent interactions can be few and far between but can shatter our knowledge of the Divine and what we hold to be true about Them. 

People have left rituals wherein the Divine have taken part and tend to have a complete uprooting of how their life before the ritual had been. Once you have a true and real experience with the Divine, you cannot actually misinterpret Them unless you tell yourself what happened must not be true. This is typically common because They are so unnerving and discomforting that people who are terrified of leaving the life they had known behind tend to leave that experience alone because they fear change and have anxiety around it.

I personally can say that since my first face to face interaction with Loki, I am no longer the person I was prior to that experience. My life began to wildly twist into something I didn’t recognize – not everything felt okay for the moment being but it did end up being a breaking point for a lot of things that were stale in my life.

I would not be writing this blog post today nor would I have any of the perspectives I have now had I not had such an experience. 

The thing is, however, these sorts of things can be accessible to people. It doesn’t have to be a face to face interaction with a Deity that can uproot your life – it could be a mere fragment of an idea, a sentence, or a meaning of a tarot reading that can ultimately leave resounding impacts on your life forever after. Shit, I’ve even changed the course of my life because of a tarot reading that came across my tiktok feed at 4:44 at night and the feelings that surrounded that reading were too strong to ignore. The following day, I broke up with my fiancé, moved out of his house, and started a new life. 

These sorts of things don’t have to be enormous catalysts like leaving your fiancé or starting over from scratch, it could be catalysts in your perceptions, how you feel about certain things or people, or even what choices you were making up to that point of Divine intervention. More often than not, you don’t really know if it was at all a Divine interference until long after the experience has happened if they are not as common.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the Divine are absolutely unmistakable beings. You cannot make up the feelings and the events that unfold after any sort of interaction with Them or any energy shift, increase in emotion, awe, or anything else that is felt alongside experiencing a Deity. You can’t fabricate an interaction with a Divine being as being anything else than Divine – you just need to have the context surrounding Their nature to discern that for yourself without any intruding feelings from those who would not know otherwise. 

Discernment is knowing how the Divine affects you as a human being, what Their nature typically looks like as we know throughout history and time, and how we perceive Them among ourselves without the bullshit of a community who doesn’t know up from down. We have no way of navigating our own discernment in many ways because we as a Westernized society have no context for this way of thinking. That is why it is important that I reframe these ideas that are widely thought of as being true and reshaping them to question why they are there in the first place.

The more open you are to changing your views and rethinking Their nature given such an experience, the less likely it is for you to stumble into having a sock puppet for a relationship or be part of a community that is unsupportive. UPG becomes obsolete to these experiences, and verification falls by the wayside and becomes a moot point.