NO GODS BUT MY OWN 0

An introduction

It’s no surprise to me that some of our first gods were representations of the sun. 

Can you imagine what it must have been like to experience the sun in a time before it was demystified and explained away? This glowing orb could pierce the horizon, bring light and warmth throughout the day, control seasons by the duration of its presence, have cold and storms define its absence, and get swallowed back into the horizon once again only to be replaced by darkness, the stars, and the Moon. The sun was a companion, a savior, a provider, and a punisher. It was born every morning and died every night before being born AGAIN after a long darkness. It only made sense to give this otherworldly presence some sort of identity, to give it power and agency of its own, to name it.

We didn’t stop there. We gave names and identities to the earth and nature, the wind, the water. We deified all the things we needed as humans to survive.

Why wouldn’t we view the world as truly alive?

Why wouldn’t we frame that life as something we could grasp, something nearly human but far, far superior?

Those earlier people had no science to dissect the process behind what fed them and kept them warm. All they had were their stories and their ideas of what could possibly drive those forces to provide or deprive them what they needed.

What it must have felt like to be the first people to Zeus or Osiris or Thor! To be the first to speak to the spirits or call upon an elder for aid. 

At this point we have done everything in our power as a society to demystify EVERYTHING. We have scientific explanations for nearly all of the things we once feared and directly inspired the denizens of the higher planes. We know that the sun is just a star we orbit and not some serpent winding its way across our sky. We know that high pressure systems and air temperature create our weather and not some capricious god on a bender. We understand migratory patterns and behaviors in animals that we hunt so we no longer need to bother the spirits of the hunt to guide our arrows.

Then there are the scholars. They read book after book, pulling every text apart, studying the syntax and subtext until you have to dig through miles of papers and dissertations to find the art and life left in any of it. Traditions have been reborn, recontextualized, and reconstituted so many times and in so many ways that they have more flavors than Baskin Robbins. 

But even with all the science and scholarship to guide us we still have the fear. We still have the need. We still have the urge to petition those same superior beings that helped us back before we tried to explain it all away. We hammer and contort them into the shapes we need to help us through a more modern world.

What if we let those entities retire along with the world that created them?

What if we found our OWN gods and spirits, ones more suited for our needs now? 

What if we crafted being for our dead cell phone batteries or the existential dread of the careerless life in capitalism? What shape would the lord of toxic relationships take? What urges and drives should we personify to better shape our personal worlds?

That idea is the driving force behind NO GODS BUT MY OWN. 

It’s my hope to regain a more personal connection to the luminous through NGBMO by channeling the urge to personify my needs into creative god-forms. I know I’m not the first to come to this concept. You can find a metric ton of examples in chaos magic with their use of egregores and servitors or groups like the DKMU with their manifestation of Ellis. 

There doesn’t seem to be much of a barrier between the idea of creating a god or discovering one. Do these beings reveal themselves to those prepared to receive them or are they created by the willful act of human creation? Your opinion on that would depend on your thoughts on what the human imagination really is. Is the creative act brought about whole cloth from the mind or channeled from another plane of existence like Alan Moore’s Ideaspace?

That is the question I am asking with NGBMO:

Are all gods denizens of this imaginal realm and if they are shouldn’t we all be capable of making our OWN gods to worship and call upon for help?

Nothing against traditionalists or people who choose to follow pre-existing pathways to the transcendent but I have yet to find a system that works for me. Like many people who look into magic I’ve tried out different facets of a lot of different practices and schools but after years of esoteric study nothing has resonated with me with even half the potency that I’ve found in the simple act of creative practice.

Perhaps it’s that I’ve never been as committed to a magical tradition as much as I have been to my own artistic evolution but that feels like it can only explain part of the story. I think a big part of my issues regarding magic and tradition is that belief feels like playing pretend but with absolute conviction.  People dress up, do a prescribed ritual, and have faith that they will get a consistent result.

Thelemites do it.

Catholics do it.

Wiccans, enochian magicians, you name it.

Everyone everywhere performing a ritual of any kind put the whole of their faith into that action and everything that led to it.

A performance. 

Play acting.

My four year old does that very same thing every single time he speaks to his stuffed animals or imaginary friends. He makes believe with absolute, total conviction. 

Why can’t that same energy and commitment be put into our own ideas?

I’m sure there are plenty of occult experts that would disagree with the premise behind NGBMO and that will be their prerogative. I have an inkling that I may hear from a few of them. This project isn’t necessarily for people with a fully cemented practice but I hope that people can appreciate this experiment for its artistic merit and not view it as an affront to their core beliefs. This is not an attempt to tear down or deconstruct anything.

This project is truly for the explorers and experimenters, those who can't feel comfortable in the paths of others. I want NGBMO to be a call to action. I want this newsletter to be an example of self actualized spiritual and artistic soul spelunking.

Consider this the introduction. Starting in the next few weeks, NGBMO will feature a single deity, spirit, god, or entity, along with spells and incantations to enlist their aid. Think of it as an esoteric Monsters Manual for use in the campaign that is your magical practice. Nothing I include is set in stone, though. The stats are merely a guideline. I want you to improvise. Do your own experiments. I’m providing nothing more than clay. You have to be the ones to sculpt it. 

Each installment of NBGMO will also feature sketches and news from me. I intend to mostly discontinue my social media presence so this will be my primary way to disseminate new art and announce new releases. 

These newsletter will not have a set schedule. You should receive anywhere between 1-4 installments a month. I will try my best to not overwhelm.

There will be no sponsored content and I will NEVER push products that I either don’t believe in or have a hand in creating it. I’m not a salesman and I don’t intend to be one.

This is where it starts.

Together we can build our own temples and chant our own rites. 

Let’s find our own divinity and make a world with no gods but our own.