Devoured by Flame

For the majority of my relationship with Loki, I felt like I was being incredibly obsessive. While everyone else seemed to have their head together when talking about their Gods and what they do with Them, I couldn’t seem to not think about Loki all of the time. I went out of my way to attempt to talk to Him at least once during busier stressful days and otherwise throughout the day every day.

I mainly caused myself a lot of distress when it came to what I should or should not be doing when it came to talking to Him – so much so that I shut it out altogether when it came down to it. 

There were a lot of things involved in this. 

I was with a partner who did not understand this type of thing. He made me feel like I was crazy not just in this way but in others outside of Loki. He questioned my beliefs and my feelings around my religion, but mostly because he knew that I was devoted to Loki, especially having been obsessed with Tom Hiddleston and Marvel for so long outside of when I was pagan. It was demeaning and even though I didn’t necessarily care about it at the time, I knew it was impacting the way I believed in my own experiences.

I am also AuADHD. One of the most common parts of AuADHD is hyper fixation and special interests and Loki is my special interest. I shamed myself a lot of the time because I couldn’t seem to shake why I had so many feelings for Loki. It could become a problem when I was wanting to dissociate, but most of the time, I was so involved via talking to Loki that I was almost always working on something with Him. Otherwise, I learned fairly early on that dissociating was not something Loki was going to be fond of and any time I did try to dissociate, He would disappear.

To make all of this ten times harder to discern, the community of people I was involved with had very little context for a devotional relationship with a Deity. It all made little sense to them given that the Divine was so far removed from their rituals and practices that I don’t see how any of them even had an ability to discern their own spiritual beliefs beyond what everyone else spoke of. 

I’ve spoken a bit about my experiences with them, but this is one thing that ended up making my ability to discern so much more difficult. I wanted to believe they were right because they were the only group I had. I wanted people I could be with and come to whenever I had times that were emotionally difficult in my path and these people were what I hoped to be that for me but it was not going to be the case based on the ranges of beliefs.

At the end of the day, I felt scared to be in a relationship with Loki in the way that I was. I did not feel comfortable sharing myself in the way that I wanted to with other pagans and certainly not feel comfortable with myself. Certain things, of course, are meant to be sacred and kept to myself, but other things I didn’t even feel like anyone else even had the context for that wasn’t just whatever historical solution there seemed to be or basing it off of some moral doctrine about wyrd or whatnot.

I wanted to be normal so I did everything in my power to water down my experiences to make them palatable for the wider audience (or whomever I was trying to please at the time). I would have to discount the kinds of experiences I was having to fit in with both that group, make peace with myself, and to continue being in the relationship I was in. 

I felt like I had to play it cool whenever I was wanting to talk about my relationship with Loki. If I said too much too soon about anything, I would be criticized or questioned about my discernment. If I said nothing at all, people would assume I know nothing. It was a hard role to play but I played it because I didn’t want to be alone.

I gaslit my own experiences to suit everyone else and became something like a follower rather than a believer in my own beliefs and opinions. 

I know some people might read this and see themselves in my experiences. I see this happen a lot with new people online and in person. People start going down the pagan rabbit hole and end up wanting to make their experiences like everyone else’s and having relationships with the Gods like everyone else’s to make sure that what they are experiencing can be validated and made real. 

This impacts a lot more than our own relationships. Instead of understanding our own intuition and experiences, we look to others to see if that is real because we are so afraid of being wrong, insulting the Gods, and making sure we aren’t alone in our own religious path. In being afraid of being wrong, we tend to make ourselves into something of an echo chamber where we are constantly searching for validation and people are making money off of our own lack of self awareness and discernment. 

I have to say that regardless, it is important to have community. It is necessary to find other people to be with in these sorts of situations even if it’s only one other person who gets it. However, it is also important to be aware of how easy it is to fall prey to adhering to the expectations of a community or within an individual relationship. It is not going to be obvious from the outside, but the further and further you get involved in a bubble, the more difficult it will be to find your own way.

You aren’t going to find the Gods on social media, in modernized traditions, or in other people. They are not going to be found in the myths or the stories people tell about Them that either have an ounce of truth in them or have something else going on. They are found within ourselves as humans and within our own nature and innate development to begin to see Them as more than just a transcendent sort of being but rather, immanent.

Immanence is something that the Western religions do not seem to have a good concept of. Immanence means that you can touch, grasp, and know the Divine. For the Divine to have immanence, it would mean that They are capable of being known by humans and They are easy to come by. 

The opposite but also a similar concept would be transcendence. Transcendence is what the majority of the Christianized world wants to believe – including pagans. Though pagans normally try to think the Gods as knowable, we do not make any attempt in trying to get to know Them outside of the context of Their myths. We think that by knowing the myths, we know Them, when that is not the case. If we only personify the Gods as characters within stories, we will attempt to personify Them as holier than us. Making Them less real by making Them characters in a story, it tells us that we are thinking of Them as separate when ultimately, They are what makes us human and we are what makes Them Divine.

It is difficult to acknowledge that the Gods can be both immanent and transcendent at the same time. In fact, a lot of mysticism is holding two seemingly opposite ideas at once. However, we try to contain the Gods by putting Them in boxes and making sure They check off all the boxes so we can tell They are real or not. We try to make Them into things They are not in order for us to get through to Them while also tearing us apart by making Them this extraordinary phenomenon who can only happen to special people in special ways. 

I spoke about this a bit in my blog post about a teacher of mine saying that the Gods look at us like goldfish. If we are goldfish to the Gods, then why are we even bothering to have a relationship with Them? Why not just go back to being atheist like the rest of the non-religious world? 

If more people take this philosophy that the Gods look down on us from above rather than appreciate the knowledge that They are here and able to be with us, the Gods become even more distant than They had been before polytheism even had its revival. We can know Their names but we will never know who They are and Their faces if we cannot believe or create an understanding of how we can build a more intimate relationship with Them. They will just become new stories and new fiction for the generations who follow. 

If we ought to have leaders, they should not be getting to decide what is real from what is not. They should not be discerning for anyone unless it is an actively harmful belief. Should a leader have an authentic relationship with a Deity, it would be humbling for them.

Knowing the Gods is life changing, earth shattering, and a kind of growth that happens without you realizing it. If you know the Gods, what other people have to say won’t affect you and shatter your own beliefs and opinions. 

If you find yourself dissociating while scrolling through Tumblr or TikTok, comparing your experiences to that of others, or perhaps you’re like me and found a community in real life that was seemingly open to other people, consider that not everything is going to be what everyone else wants it to be. As a human, it is easy to get wrapped up in everyone else’s garbage that it gets harder to trust your own discernment.

We are communal creatures – we want to be like everybody because that’s how we survive. But if you’re afraid of being yourself in a community that is seemingly embracing such an ideal, then perhaps you need to take a better look at what you’re doing.

The end of my story is not often talked about in mystical spaces because it’s ugly and hard. I left my partner of 8 years and left the community I was in for 4 years in order for me to find Loki. I graduated from therapy and realized that the real reason I did any of that in the first place was to please other people. 

Knowing the Gods like I began to know Them, I learned that the Gods had no interest in appeasing humans or being palatable. They don’t work like how we want Them to be working because They don’t fit into stories or narratives that you’ll find on Tumblr or TikTok. In fact, arguably, They are enormous Beings of pure energy who have no interest in making everyone love Them. They are only interested in having people who want to know Them around and They do that by testing our mettle and seeing if we can withstand the barriers other people put around Them. 

For me, I had to sacrifice what I thought I knew to replace it with how Loki wants me to know Him. I had to risk being wrong in order to find what I now know to be right. 

I wish it wasn’t this hard knowing the Gods. I wish I could say I wasn’t terrified during it, and that it was easy once I knew what was going on but it hurt more than I could possibly say. However, once Loki became apparent to me, I could no longer be blind to the things that He needed from me and so the change had to be made. The alternative was living with the decision that pleasing other people would come before a relationship that I so desperately wanted to have with Loki.

Trusting the Divine to show you who They are and not making decisions based on what everyone else decides is Divine is terrifying. You will feel crazy, question your feelings, and you may even be lonely. However, once that innate itch to know the Divine is scratched, you’re never going to feel alone again. It will become easier and easier to walk away from the things that harm you – even those that harm you who claim to be with the Gods you follow.