Working With Deities

In this blog, I write about my personal experiences with some pagan deities and a folk saint.

artwork by me, Hekate

Content note: I mention experiences with bipolar disorder, especially psychoses. I also mention death.

Let’s start with a disclaimer: My experiences with pagan deities and a folk saint are my own. Yours may be very different, even with regards to the same deity. My UPG (unverified personal gnosis) does not mean that I can speak for the deities or have messages by them for others. I am also not a priestess and have not been initiated into any tradition or something similar.

I was brought up non-denominational. Both of my parents are not interested in any religion. However, as a child I learned a lot about Christianity, as many people around me were Christians – no fundamentalists, by the way. It seemed to me their way of living their faith was reading the bible, going to Church on Sundays and thinking about God’s love for them. However, if any of them would have said that God talks to them personally in one way or another, other people would have wondered about their mental health. (Later I learned there are some rather mystic Christian traditions in which a closer contact to God is common, so to speak, but I never explored that myself.)

When I started walking on the pagan path, I discovered that things in paganism can be very different. I learned there are plenty of deities and other spiritual entities all over the world and that some of them actually talk to some people – in states of deep meditation, trance, path work, shamanic journeying, astral travels, or in a more abstract way, through divination or similar methods, or even in the mind of a person, like an inner voice.

Am I just imagining things?

I have bipolar disorder and have had experiences with psychoses, the last was in 2008. Thanks to good meds and therapy – and my spiritual activities – I haven’t had any since then. To me, it is extremely important to stay grounded and not loose touch with reality, because I never want to experience a psychosis again, which can be completely uncontrollable and very frightening.

By the way, here is a quote about that topic which I like a lot:
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

(― Joseph Campbell, »Psychology of the Future«)

However, since I was a child I have always felt like I had one foot firmly planted in everyday reality and the other one in mystical planes. And I needed to do something about it to find a healthy balance in these two (or more) different planes. I also had an inkling that this would significantly improve my health and well-being. Which it did over the years, to some extent.

And another disclaimer at this point: No, chronic illnesses can not be cured with spirituality or witchcraft/magic and if someone tells you otherwise, they either don’t know any better or are most probably a lying charlatan who wants to sell you magical products or services which won’t help.

Before I became a pagan, I had a shamanic training, eight years ago. I accepted then that there are spiritual entities like spirit guides who talk to people during shamanic journeying. Or they choose other forms of communication or show the shamanic practitioner something. Actually, as a young adult, I had learned about something quite similar: visualisations of safe spaces, and inner guides, in a therapeutic setting.

So when I started working with pagan deities circa three years ago, I simply accepted that they wanted to communicate with me, much like I was used to communication with the spirit guides in my shamanic activities. I didn’t ask whether I was losing my mind or was having halluzinations when the deities appeared in my states of trance and spoke to me.

But let’s talk about discernment for a while. If you have an UPG, how can you be sure it is not something you have made up on your own? A fantasy? An ego-trip?

One way is to ask the respective deity for a clear sign in your everyday life. (Bente, »The Norse Witch« talked about this in one of their videos on YouTube.) I have tried that and it worked well.

Find like-minded people, other devotees of your deity. If they feel comfortable sharing some of their experiences with the deity, you may discover similarities. Which could lead to shared personal gnosis. On the other hand, some experiences may be quite different from your own (like I said above in the disclaimer).

If a deity gives you a task which pushes you a bit (or more than a bit) out of your comfort zone, ask yourself: would you have made up such a task in an imagination, a fantasy? By the way, speaking of tasks – you can always negotiate with deities. If a task they ask of you is too hard, or if the timing is bad, talk to your deity about it.

So what is life for me like, as an pagan polytheist and what experiences do I have?

In the following, I share some UPG experiences. I often feel similar to what some polyamorous people might feel with regards to their partners. Do I do all of Them justice? Do they all feel appreciated? One thing I have experienced is that they are not jealous of the others.

Here are »my« deities: Brigid, Aphrodite, Hekate, Loki and the Mexican folk Saint Santa Muerte, a personification of Death. Yeah, I know, it’s an eclectic mix. But as many pagans say, the gods (or deities) call whom they call.

I have started doing psychopomp work regularly ca. 3 years ago which is helping souls of dead people (or animals) cross over into the afterlife. I learned about this in a shamanic training. Santa Muerte and Hekate support me with this work sometimes. I also have support by some spirit guides, and Hekate and Santa Muerte also give me tasks to fulfill.

I daily pray to Brigid for health (my own, family, friends, acquaintances, neighbours). I started this at the beginning at the pandemic and have turned it into a daily practice, because as an Indian proverb goes, »A healthy person has lots of wishes, a sick person only one.«

I also pray to Her for inspiration. I have come to know Her as a goddess who can be quite fierce, I mean She is among other things a goddess of fire and smithcraft and it takes a lot of force to work with fire and metal.

Another aspect of Her is less well-known: She is a goddess of the dispossessed, homeless/houseless people and probably also of refugees to some extend. I honour Her by giving money or something to eat/drink, or masks against Covid-19 to homeless people, whenever I can.

When Brigid was new in my life, I felt obliged to write poems for Her, but found out I really had a hard time writing them. So I stopped it and continued with writing novels, short stories and some non-fiction. I dedicate my writing to Her.

I learned a lot about self-love, love in its many forms and self-care from Aphrodite and this is an on-going process. I dedicate some of my writing to Her (for instance Romance novels). In my UPG, Aphrodite is a gentle and caring goddess, almost motherly. I know that in some regions in antiquity She was also worshipped as a goddess of war, but She hasn’t shown aspects of that to me. Which may be quite different to some of Her devotees I guess.

Aphrodite loves beautiful things. My altar space for Her is full of flowers, jewelry, heartshaped-things (yeah, I know, what a cliché, but here we go), pink and red as main colors.

Hekate can be very strict and demanding. She often pushes me out my comfort zone. Which might make me uncomfortable first, but it’s always good in the long run. Working with Her has also helped me to improve my »taking shit from no one«, for instance setting healthy boundaries for myself. On the other hand, Hekate is also a compassionate, caring goddess in my experience.

Loki likes to shakes things up a bit – not to create chaos, but in order for me to find solutions to problems, try out new ways when necessary, walk the paths less chosen, find new ideas etc. They want me to be my most authentic self and to not hide behind a »happy mask« and such when I am feeling down. They have created a place for us to meet on the astral plane and whenever I have a serious problem I reach out to Them. Loki has always shown up. They are a very caring deity with a big heart for all Their devotees. There is a prejudice in some Heathen spaces about Loki that they are the Norse equivalent of the Christian devil, but that is far from my experience (and from many others of Their devotees, too as far as I read and heard).

And then there is Santa Muerte. She is a very busy saint folk and a personification of Death. I quote from a review of mine: »There are several paradoxes surrounding Santa Muerte – for instance, people turn to her for all sorts of issues very much connected to life (instead of death), like love, passion, abundance, prosperity or legal matters. She also gets venerated by people in prison as well as prison guards or other law enforcement workers.« (1) She sometimes visits so to speak, when I do psychopomp work. She also seems to listen to all my prayers and grants me this and that, for which I am very grateful. Now if you wonder if this skeleton saint is spooky or scary to me, I’d say no. It’s quite the opposite in my UPG – Santa Muerte is a very caring and kind saint and many of her followers talk very affectionately about Her. Santa Muerte wants Her own altar space, not sharing with anyone. Which is also a Shared Personal Gnosis, because I read again and again, that Santa Muerte should have Her own altar table (or another space on Her own).

For now, I have decided to focus on these deities. Some people go around invoking deities or praying to them as they please and as they see fit for their purposes and requests. I do not do that. I’d rather research a deity as best as I can and try to form a relationship with Them, before I ask Them any favours. And this is a thing I like very much about pagan polytheism. That you can have »a spiritual team« as an acquaintance of mine calls it. That you can form a close relationship with your deities, work with them or worship them or whatever term you’d like to choose for this. I wouldn’t want to miss this for the world.

A Personal Theory about Deities

Now the following is just a theory of mine. I cannot back it up with any academic or other resources, but I just want to put it out there. As a pagan polytheist, I believe that all the deities who ever have been worshipped, exist in some form or another. Also, newer ones have come into existence.

For a long time I couldn’t wrap my head about the fact that some religions differ very much in certain beliefs. For instance, in Christianity there is no belief in reincarnation. You only have one life, one chance. The stories about how our world and its inhabitants started to exist and how the afterlife is, also widely vary.

So, how can one explain that? Is one thing true and the other not? I then often think about parallel worlds or dimensions or a multiverse. Maybe all of these spiritual notions are true at the same time, in different spiritual dimensions.

I got reminded of this old joke:

A man dies and comes into hell. To his astonishment, hell is a really lovely place, with nice gardens, bars, sport events and partys. Everyone there is having a good time. There are also some demons hanging around, but they are nice and friendly.

One day, as he is wandering around, he sees a wall and behind it, there is a desert-like place with lots of fires and many people who are screaming in despair and pain.

He asks one of the demons, »What is that? Who are those people?«

The demon says, »Oh, those are the Catholics. They want hell to be that way.«

So maybe there is a hell, but also different underworlds and afterlife places of many, many pantheons. And maybe, there are places where people reincarnate and others where they don’t. If we think about the world as a multidimensional place, a sort of multiverse – all the deities and spiritual entities, all their realms and so much more fit into there, I guess.

Footnote and more

(1) From my review about »Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint« by R. Andrew Chesnut

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3960679431

The Norse Witch on YouTube, a very recommendable channel for Norse paganism/Heathenry and Witchcraft: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNorseWitch

If you are interested in working with pagan deities or other spiritual entities and would like to research some of them with books, feel free to take a look at my book list: https://bit.ly/books_pagan_deities (The link leads to a Google Doc)

© Andrea Grünbaum