In my local group we often work with the deities in a very anthropomorphised form. We imagine them as a separate spirit that we can speak to them like a person. Some people whoever do not think of deity like this they think of them like some sort of power source that can be used. I hope to explore these different ideas.
What’s a model?
Well, in science we often deal with things we don’t yet understand, a bit like magic. For example the formation of the atom. We didn’t know the arrangement, but it was clear that some bits of it responded like they had positive charge and some like they had negative charge. By seeing these positive and negative parts we were able to develop our understand of electricity. So we drew up an idea of how the atom was arranged and it looked a bit like a plum pudding, a mixture of positive parts and negative parts all mixed together in an atom sized pudding shape. This is a model which we use to help us explain and understand what’s going on in the atom which we can’t see.
Soon however this model was realised to be inaccurate because an experiment showed that most of the atom is actually open space because tiny particles and fly right through it, but also that some where in the centre there is a large lump of material that stuff can bounce off of. So we changed our model scientifically. This is a bit like picturing god sitting on the clouds until one day we went into space and suddenly realised that if we looked down there was no god there, so we had to change our model of god. We began to image god having a transcendent existence which was actually postulated around 2000 years before, but that was not how people visualised it.
Interestingly enough there are somethings where they need to be models in multiple different ways because we don’t have a model that covers all the bases, Light is one such thing. For example in most cases light behaves like it’s a wave, so a wave is a good model for light, but in some instances light behaves like a particle. Deity is like this.
What’s a deity?
Some people visualise gods as an entities, which have an existence separate from us in some spiritual reality. Some visualise the gods and living inside each of us, each of us having our own gods. Some people suggest that our brains are all connected together in a collective unconscious and that some ideas and thoughts are the same across all our minds and they act like gods/goddess. When you connect to gods and goddesses in the collective unconscious we are actually connecting to the same thing. These are all models for gods.
Yeah this is very simplified and I don’t have the time to write a full essay on what is a deity, but these are the most common ideas that show up in occult circles. If you have any others please use the contact us form to let me know what I should have added.
How do we approach deity?
To be honest you can just think of deity however you like. We work with them like they are separate entities and there’s a very specific reason why.
Many magicians think of them as not having any mindset and interact with them like they are infinity stones or something. I worry that one day I might come across a deity who does have a personality whether I thought of them like a power source or an entity and I would offend them trying to treat them like a power source I can just plug into. Whatever blessings I seek from a deity could quickly turn to curses if I don’t know the proper respect. If the deity is an entity it might have a certain formula for interacting with it which it appreciated and frankly it could just do whatever it wanted, so respect is important. Imagine you were a deity and I conjured you, I didn’t say hello and I started sucking your power out. What would you do? If you spoke to me and then I said “shhhhh, you are my imagination distracting me.” You’re probably going to leave right? And maybe fuck somethings up for me in the process? If however deity is a mental construct within our own mind, then surely it wouldn’t mind us treating it like a person. It wouldn’t have an issue and it would become a way to develop the creative faculties of the mind.
What if there existed a mental construct and deity beyond it? People often experience both these models working a bit like the models for light in science. So if they both work then let’s ask ourselves what do we want to connect to? The construct in our own heads? Or the deity that exists beyond us? Well by working in a way that treats the deity as separate then we can try to connect to it. If the deity doesn’t exist like that then we will still connect to our own mental construct, but by consciously connecting to our own mental construct we limit what we are capable of.
Magic often uses tradition as a way to connect to what people have worked on before. Let’s just say very little seems to go to waste. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn magic system is not old. In fact there’s very little showing its existence pre-1880s although it has roots in something older. But there have been countless people who have been practicing its magic wrong for years believing it should work and it doesn’t, but when they relearn what they are doing suddenly it starts working. Like people who use invoking fire pentagram for invocation and invoking earth pentagram when they want to banish. Many of them have got all heaps of trouble with strange entities floating about, making people see things, have weird dreams and an atmosphere in the house that feels thick and sickening. So by approaching deity and spirits as separate ontological entities follows a tradition of history going back over centuries and taps into the power of many who have come before.
Results… well I just want to say try it and see, but looking at my results I would say that approaching deity and summoned entities as separate entities yields more interesting results. Sometimes less predictable results to be fair, but often more interesting results.