It is not a common topic for this to be discussed but I’ve touched on it very briefly in previous posts and so I want to speak about what this even looks like and how it happens with the Gods.
There seems to be a lot of fear around having the Gods approach you and maybe it’s not from the Gods Themselves rather than the humans who prey on those who are seeking to find answers and cannot come to their own understanding themselves. There is a way to do this in an ethical way and it is also possible to do so from an empowered standpoint. So in this short series I’m going to talk about why this work is important, what we can get from this work, how we can do so ethically, how we can get to the point that we can do this ethically, and then speak about logistics.
So, why should the Gods speak through a human if the human is perfectly capable of hearing the Gods talk themselves?
This is something I struggled with answering myself in the first days of when I did this kind of work. Why would I need a direct message from my God if I can hear Him in general?
People are afraid of being wrong. Because they are so afraid of it, they get in this mindset of being okay with having to go through leaps and bounds and struggle to find their own meaning in their own way. This is good, of course, critical thinking is absolutely the most important quality in all of this. We must consider all angles when doing this stuff. However, there gets to a point in your own discerning that hearing things can become a problem.
It becomes a problem when you stop actually hearing the Gods and you develop a mindset where you guess their answer based on conversations you’ve had with other people who suggest things to you who are likely unfamiliar with how a Deity actually behaves. It gets to a point where the nuance becomes bartered for in the case of being wrong so you have evidence in other people that it’s actually true. Instead of talking to a being with feelings and opinions, it can dissolve into your own sort of thinking and opinions and manifest as an egregore due to the resounding nature of the echo chamber you’re in.
The thing that makes people queasy about a medium is that humans have their own biases and so do mediums. While I’m not saying it is 100% perfect, neither are the Gods. The Gods have their own problems to deal with when working with a medium just as we do.
Consider that when we are speaking with a God even in our own heads, They carve out room for Themselves little by little. We can already hear the Gods even in the beginning of our work with Them, but it gets muddled the more things stand in the way of Their meaning because we take it to mean the wrong thing. Meanings get misconstrued all the time even with human language, and the human brain isn’t immune to misinterpreting even their own forms of language and suggestion.
It can get muddled especially when it is a particularly emotional topic that the human asserts to be true because the opposite would be terrifying. It can also be muddled when the thing that they are needing to hear from a God does not have the proper context or way of interpreting their message within your own brain. The same thing happens with a medium but it depends on how much of the medium’s brain has made space for the Deity in question. The more the medium allows control for the Deity in question to speak, the more the medium knows and works with the Deity in question, the better the answer is.
The Divine have Their own problems, especially when it comes to navigating a person’s memory and thinking. Our brains are like translators for Them. If They are unfamiliar with how to work it, the message might get thrown out or chosen to be worded with different language, or it can even be a bit more cryptic depending on the circumstance.
In an ideal world, only those who have intimate relationships with the God in question would speak for Them as a medium, but that tends to not happen in pagan spaces should there even be a medium.
What Would an Actual Message Look and Feel Like?
Instead of understanding the nuance to this sort of thing, people dismiss it full scale as wrong and dismiss the message entirely. Nothing is black and white when it comes to the Gods. Even when a medium is not fully possessed and the level of nuance a Deity would like to approach the message with is lackluster, if it is true that a Deity is giving a message and the medium isn’t full of shit, more often than not, it is a real message. If the person receiving the message is already capable of recognizing the Deity’s energy even at a smaller scale, they will typically also feel that this is the case. The words become a lot more than just words and the person speaking it would still carry a sort of vibrancy of energy that would not be the case should they just be speaking plainly to you.
Typically, the Deity’s words will become even more meaningful in time. The meaning will unfold gradually and the significance of what is happening will be known and rarely forgotten. Sometimes, it can even be a blunt meaning that can strike you where you stand. It would feel like a knife slicing through a fog and it can feel breathtaking.
Loki is well-known to have that sort of effect as His words are extremely sharp and cutting and whenever He says something to me in my head or through another person that is extremely blunt, it takes me by surprise. This is not just due to the audacity of what He is saying, but because the weight of His words feels like the cut of a knife.
The amount that you can pick up on how present a Deity is in a medium also depends on how open you are to knowing what a God may feel like. If you have a long-standing relationship with the God, it can feel even more strongly than if you had a passing relationship. Regardless, there will always be a change in the air around the medium once a God is present, but it will depend on how deeply the medium is and also how well you know the God for it to be obvious.
For instance, my very first experience of having someone carry Loki was very subtle but I can still remember the buzzing of the air like a live wire. The person who carried Loki I now know wanted something out of it that was not at all what Loki was wanting for her and in return it was a mess. This is a good example of why it’s important to have an authentic relationship with the Gods and also, maybe don’t try to control Them for your own benefit.
Regardless of what I learned about what happened later, I remember not being able to take my eyes off of Him in the body of the person who was carrying Him, and I could not see anything else but Him, as everything else became periphery. The moment He came down was surprising because it hardly took two seconds for Him to come into the medium’s body and it took a moment for the rest of the room to respond accordingly.
Additionally, there is also an empathetic response to the words that are being said. If a God feels somewhat passionately about the human or about the message that is being relayed, the room can typically feel it at the same time as the God. Many people would have tears without even realizing it, or laugh if something the God said is amusing to the Deity in question.
Because the God is a lot bigger than the medium, consider that the presence is more like having a fixed point of condensation in a mist of otherwise very pointed energy. The condensation is within the medium, but surrounding the medium is an aura of the presence of the God which can take up entire rooms. There can be a sort of residue effects and the more used to this you are, sometimes conversations with the God can be carried on a lot easier even if you’re not the one speaking to the medium at the time.
This has a lasting benefit that few people are aware of. This can make discerning much easier for the people involved in this experience and it can become a lot easier for people to pick up on the Divine energy signatures. This makes this an extremely efficient and effective tool for the God for Their followers as well as the followers for their God. The lasting effects of my first experience allowed for my relationship with Loki to become even more resonant and I began to hear Him significantly clearer than I did before. I drew nearer to Him by the day and I eventually began to do this work myself based off of His explicit instructions that I now knew were being heard clearly because not only did I hear Him, but I could feel His presence shift in a more nuanced and palpable way.
In my time doing this sort of thing, I’ve witnessed seers especially have trouble relating a message from a God because they do not already have the context for the message and the God also has no idea how the human involved will come up with an answer. So the answer for the inquirer becomes shaky at best and is often an analogy, metaphor, story, or another representation of the meaning of the message from the God that makes little sense until you think about it harder. Most early communication in the early points of a relationship tend to be like this.
Most people only expect there to be cryptic non-answers from the Divine because of the fact that the mediums involved may not have a working relationship with the God involved. Even when you’re the one trying to figure out the message, most people don’t expect there to be full sentences at all or struggle to reconcile that there may not be a full sentence and need visuals and analogies to carve out the meaning.
It is a sliding scale, though. Remember what I said earlier about the Deity carving out a fragment of space for Themselves in order to speak to us? There’s varying levels of control in which a Deity can possess a human body which I can get into logistics in a different post. Additionally, not all Deities are really into giving cryptic answers and it also depends on how often the Deity Themselves talk to humans. Once again, the Divine are not perfect and this practice has been hidden for centuries before now. The Gods are not used to having the ability to use human language at this point and it’s something They typically get used to over time.
The accuracy can also depend on how deeply of a trance the medium is willing to be in, plus how trusting they are with the Deity in question. Sometimes the Deity will just hop right in if the medium is offering, but that is more often than not harmful for the medium involved. Full-scale possession is also not a thing that some Deities are willing to do because it would be like putting the human into a deep coma, and that is unethical for Them. A Deity is never 100% within a human body and throws the human 100% out. It takes a bit of time and quality practice before the Deity can use a human body and brain to figure out how to translate things. Which is another reason why having a handshake relationship for this kind of thing is not advised.
The Divine are more or less invested in this kind of union with a medium. It is like sex in the way that being able to combine Their energy with a human’s is pleasurable and in an ideal environment, the human would also get value out of this dynamic, as well. The human would be in a space where they are getting enjoyment from the Deity because the Deity is enjoying where They are, and the human gets the emotions and the feelings of the enjoyable experience. Obviously, the Deity is not always happy speaking to the person in question through the medium and the medium tends to get that sensation, too, and as do the other people witnessing. Which, from firsthand experience on both sides of the conversation, is not awesome.
Because it is like sex, sleeping around with Deities you are not aligned with can become harmful to your emotional well-being as well as your nervous system if you are not prepared to handle that sort of thing. It also really requires a healthy composition, exercise of both your brain and your body, and a lot of buildup in segments of time.
Back before all of this, priests, priestesses, and seers were only ever carrying a handful of Gods and delivering messages for the Gods they worked for, rather than needing to handle an entire pantheon. A lot of priests and priestesses are known for marrying the Gods they work for, and because they are married, the union becomes more entwined with the human’s body such that carrying the God is second nature rather than an entire ordeal. At this point, marriage to a Deity has been muddled in the spans of time, and not many people even realize what they signed up for, and not many people even realize the reason why the God thinks it’s important. I’ll talk about marriage a little later.
There are people who work with multiple Gods for multiple reasons and that requires another kind of oath that is different from a marriage. Most of the time, though, a marriage would only be to one God and one God only and whether or not the Deity in question allowed for a human to marry their spouse would be another thing entirely. The other oathed people would have more freedom to go about their lives and choose who to carry and when under the protection of the God they chose to dedicate to.
Consensual possessory experiences, regardless of how experienced you are, given what I know now, is not frequent. Consent requires complete knowledge of what is going on and how it works and I don’t really believe we have all of that information yet.
I have worked intensely with Loki on this sort of thing, testing out different scenarios, speaking to a variety of people in all sorts of environments, not just ritualized functions. He has given me some key points of reference to refer back to from times before this but beyond that, this is still something that is outside of our context or thinking that isn’t extremely formal or handled with oven mitts much less any other ritual. Many people don’t believe it to be real or possible for one reason or another and then others believe it all the time even when the medium in question is not necessarily an effective one.
Regardless of everything, there are things that I’ve learned about these circumstances that has given me information about how this sort of thing can be done in a way that is safe and useful, and not harmful to the body, the mind, nor to the humans surrounding the medium, either.
Today, very few people know the risks and rewards to this kind of work and very few people do not know enough to consent to this in a reasonable way. This kind of thing is considered risky and tossed in the trash by a lot of practitioners of the reconstructionist variety, and then are told that the Gods can speak for Themselves. Which… They can but that is not the point. The result is that more people are having an awful time and get burned out easily if they do not have their own understanding of what’s even happening.
This is why me writing this series is twofold. I would like for people to understand that the Gods want to talk to humans in this form and that it is normal and appropriate while also saying that the medium involved can have an easier and more meaningful time so they don’t destroy themselves in the process. It can be an extremely rewarding, pleasurable, and empowering experience. But most of the time, it is neglected and disrespected even by the medium because they don’t know the different levels that can be attained and then when it gets to the point that it’s pleasurable, boundaries and consent becomes a problem due to the power dynamic that is shared between the human body and the Divine.
For the querant, hearing the words of the Gods and feeling Their presence is an experience that cannot be replicated. Once you know that the Divine is within a space in such an intense way, you can never really find it difficult to distinguish it anywhere else. Of course, if some atheist walked into the room and saw what was going on, they wouldn’t feel or know anything unless they were already empathetic. They might feel strange, but then dismiss it because there is no context around what a God feels like. Even a devotee might not understand what a God feels like when there is a level of proximity in this experience. It can feel terrifying, like anxiety, or like a heart attack depending on how much of the God had made an appearance.
This is something that can be worked towards in all cases and I will also discuss that in the coming posts as well as safety practices, recommendations for how to do this sorts of things, and how to go about it in a safe and sane manner. I will likely be going more into detail about it in my upcoming book but this is just an overall summary of the sorts of things that are possible.
Devoured by Flame 