Deities and Dead People.

So, I don't believe in any deities, though I recognize their use as a way to relate to or interpret magical energy, as well as calling on well-known dead people, like saints. Personally, I am more a fan of ancestor worship. I think your best bet when invoking the dead is to pick someone you have a real relationship with if at all possible, y'know? Though I suppose, if you didn't have any dead people you knew handy, calling on a celebrity of some sort would be better than calling on a truly random stranger. Hard to know how that works; if I call on Joe Smith, random dead guy, mightn't he be more likely to help me 'cause no one else is demanding his attention? But maybe being called upon gives them strength, so perhaps Valentino or Venus would be more effective? (This sounds like I'm being silly, but I'm absolutely serious.) Both ways have worked, so perhaps it's just best to embrace the power of "and".

That's one of the things about magic (and the magical aspects of religion, like prayer); over time, the things that work with some regularity have made it through, even when the initial reasons we thought they worked are or appear to be debunked. Not many people believe literally in the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods, but they have worked for people who have called on them nevertheless! One has to sort of feel ones way around the mythology and see where the commonalities are.

In this case, calling on an anthropomorphic representation of an idea, ideal or goal seems to have some efficacious properties. I suspect it's because it extends a kind of intermingling of the individual energy with the magical energy, thus making the connection more secure or lasting. Of course, I'm just guessing as usual.

In any case, I know that appealing to deities I don't believe in won't have any force, but I may try some experiments with calling on people I've known directly versus people I've known indirectly and see how that pans out. Stay tuned! (Probably for a while; this is a long term sort of experiment, really.)

In the meantime, you can observe and experiment for yourself and share the results with us here!

Comments

[Acelightning]

Basically, what we call "goddesses" and "gods" are concentrated points of the energy of the Universe. Here's a useful analogy: An icon on your computer screen isn't the program itself, but when you click on it, you activate the program. When you invoke or pray to a deity, you activate the particular form of energy it represents. There's no reason that an ancestor (biological or metaphorical), or a personal hero (real or fictional), can't also function in the same way. All that matters is that the person doing the invoking has a strong emotional response to the entity being called upon. And, of course, there are huge accumulations of emotion attached to Isis, Thor, Aphrodite, Buddha, Kali, and Jesus... or Leonardo da Vinci, Elizabeth I, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, and Amelia Earhart... or even Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

[Jenny S.]

Exactly what I was saying, Ace. :)

[Acelightning]

I was once fooling around while showing some friends my new ritual knife, and I held it above my head and intoned, "For the honor of Greyskull!" - and damned if I didn't get a little bit of a charge out of it :-)

[Jenny S.]

*laugh* I believe it!