NO GODS BUT MY OWN 08
The Wild Knot
Greetings! Welcome to another installment of No Gods But My Own. Things have returned to normal and this edition brings you a new essay and an oven fresh deitic entity for your perusal.
Enjoy!
OLD COSTUMES, SHIFTING SHAPES
A Thought Experiment
I’ve always considered myself a skeptic. For as long as I’ve orbited magic and occultism there have been large aspects of the culture that I can’t bring myself to align with or believe in. I’m not going to list all of those points of dissention here but I do want to talk about the biggest one: I don’t like gods, goddesses, demons or spirits.
I subscribe to a form of militant agnosticism that keeps me from being able to take that particular plunge. My apprehension doesn’t come from an unwillingness to believe that higher powers exist. Far from it, in fact. My agnosticism has brought me to the far more surprising conclusion: everyone is right.
All gods exist and they’re all around us.
In Marvel Comics’ Earth X trilogy it’s discovered that the Asgardian gods of Norse mythology are actually a shapeshifting race of aliens that chose their forms based on the awe and worship of the people they first appeared to. It also gave them the ability to change into animals or swap genders, whatever the God-narrative needed.
The adulation gifted unto them from humanity tethered them and bound them to the forms of Thor and Loki, Freyja and Frigg. At some point the gods and their believers forgot their skyward origins and amorphous constitution. The aliens had lost their names and faces, trading them for the worship of mankind.
In the film Contact, based on Carl Sagan's novel, Jodie Foster plays a scientist who tests out a new form of space travel. The alien she contacts while in the other-space takes the form of her father because meeting the being in it's true form would shatter her human psyche.
I think about these things a lot. What it says about names and faces, namely those belonging to the entities people rely on as the cornerstones of their magical practice, feels far more important than just a throwaway side story in a forgotten comic miniseries. Those beings are the spiritual tethers that allow certain practitioners to connect with powers higher than their own. It’s that importance that leads me to question what exactly are we summoning up when we pray or elicit the aid of gods or spirits.
Do our calls connect with the entity we desired?
Do our pleas go somewhere else?
Could the replies instead come from formless, nameless emissaries from the luminous plane who only communicate through the forms and faces we have bound them to with our beliefs and preconceptions?
Up until the easy spread of knowledge most deitic beings were regional and insulated. Gods had overlapping features with vastly different names and aspects. As people and their myths spread, so did their practices and worship, creating a sort of liminal marketplace. Over time the scope of that marketplace narrowed as the most popular and powerful developed a monopoly of belief and buried the rest into a tomb of obscurity. The entities that disappeared didn't go anywhere. We just no longer feel the need to dress the liminal energy in those particular suits of divinity. Instead, most of us find our way to the presences that survived the passage of time and life cycles of their cultures of origin.
When I say that I believe everyone is right I am being very, very literal. All gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons exist to those that want them to. I believe that all of these beings have the same origin point in liminal space and that our desires and biases have a very real influence on the population there. Just like an artist drawing up images from the aether, the true believer summons their divine benefactors.
These energetic beings from other-space can only ever arrive in the clothing you provide them. If you expect the luminous, then that's what you're going to find staring back at you. Expect something evil or malevolent and guess who's coming to dinner.
I see this as the arcane parts of our mundane world doing us a favor. Seems to me that our human mind isn't ready for the truth behind the more luminous power that exists so we expect it to dress up and hide behind the well-worn costumes of our traditions. They aren't serving us. They're indulging us.
I don't want to come off as dismissive when I say that these ur-beings are dressing up in our traditions to indulge our spiritual wanderings. Tradition and beliefs are complex systems, requiring fine details with deep meanings and emotional importance. These aren't Halloween costumes, it's full immersion following legacies that span generations.
At the same time I also don't believe that everyone is calling out to the same entity when they pray or perform a ritual. Each of us has our own iterations of these beings that we craft from our own ideas of that being. My Eris is different from your Eris which is different from the Eris of someone praying to her fifty years ago. The dressing and movements are the same but the core of worship is individuated and siloed off.
So if my thinking holds water, that we dress our gods from the fabric of our own spiritual biases, then what stops us from designing those costumes ourselves?
Could some of us create a form of personal gnosticism where we accidentally conjure forth imposter gods as a result of social pressures or a desire to appease the spiritual purity tests of tradition?
For me the ideal expression of spiritual practice is the one an individual creates for themselves, containing rituals and offerings crafted around a set of personal deitic entities. The key to that kind of creation isn't summoning up corollaries to old gods but to find the ones that suit your needs as they are now.
Old gods were made for old times. Their stories and functions match the times they were first summoned up from the other-space. My needs today are a far cry from someone petitioning Isis during the heyday of Egyptian mythology. Their power set is suited for that time and place and has to be retrofitted to the here and now.
Tradition, like nostalgia, is the denial of the present to maintain an illusion of the past. They ignore the features and bugs of our current day way of life in a hope that the old conditions can still apply. Maybe they do for some people but I'm not entirely sure that it's a healthy point of view to have. New gods don't have to be anything like what has come before and they probably shouldn't. The speed of change within worship should be just as fast as the speed of science or technology.
That’s the real problem with the idea of new gods though. We can’t move fast enough to get out of the mire of tradition. The impressions made by the gods of old are deep and sticky. They’re nearly impossible to avoid or evade. We’re stuck with them with only a slim chance of escaping. It’s difficult, at best, to avoid scavenging for ritual parts when integrating something novel into a virgin practice. Gods brought out of the other-space have strong resemblances to old gods with similar purposes.
Try as we might to break free of the shackles of tradition, we are irrevocably chained to what has come before. We’re not alone in that. The luminous beings from the other-space are right there with us, chained to the other side.
Have you ever been made to act like someone you’re not? I think most of us would have to answer that question with a resounding yes. Now imagine for a moment that you had to put on that façade forever, long beyond your natural lifespan, through the passing of generations and cultures, long into an undetermined future.
Imagine the pain and resentment that might fester in that kind of existence.
It makes me wonder if this is what the gods and spirits of yesterday feel like.
Traditions become a problem of ethics if approached from this angle. A luminous being is summoned, over and over again, only to reenact the same dramas and put on the same faces day after day, year after year. It makes something like Goetic magic or the praise of saints into a Kafkaesque prison of our creation.
We have made our indulgences into a sentence without end.
There is another side to this idea, one that seems far less myopic or cynical and that is the thought that perhaps these beings enjoy doing us these simple favors and interventions. If we return to my examples from earlier I think we have a couple good possibilities.
With Contact, we could picture them as guides trying to lead us to our destinies. If they resemble the Asgardians of Earth X our praise and devotion may be enough for them. Either of these would fit well with our more common preconceptions of gods and spirits. The possibilities are endless. The motives of beings like that would be impossible to predict or decode.
All of this brings to mind a quote from Alan Moore’s masterwork, From Hell:
The one place that gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.
That’s the idea I want to leave you with here. We make these things as real as we need them to be. We draw them up from wherever they come from and make them more than mere ideas. We dress them up in the forms we desire and consensus is not a requirement for the tangible presence of those liminal beings.
For good or ill, intentionally or unintentionally, we craft our visions of the divine with our own hands. We must manipulate responsibly.
The Wild Knot
Nature's Chaos
The Forest Enforcer
The Wild Knot is an odd sort of being in that it’s the first to truly find me without my looking for it first. It was during a walk with my son, after the wind kicked up violently and trees began to lose limbs and break apart. I’m not sure how much of it was actually happening but I had a creeping feeling and The Wild Knot appeared in my mind.
Then we heard the telltale sound of branches breaking as a tree began to fall. It sounded like it was right on top of us.
We panicked. I grabbed my son’s hand and we ran.
The wind calmed down but my son and I couldn’t shake the feeling of worry. My son kept telling me that he wanted to go home, his eyes welled with tears.
I sketched The Wild Knot the moment we got home.
How I see The Wild Knot is that it’s the embodiment of nature’s chaos and a sentinel of forest judgement. It cast a silent eye over us as the woods went from serene to ominous and did nothing more than watch as danger loomed.
I’m not sure how to call forth The Wild Knot or how to petition it for assistance. All I know is that it appeared to me during a time of great duress and did not do anything to help that.
NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
It’s been pretty quiet around NGBMO headquarters still. I’ve been in a bit of a post-partum funk after finally releasing Outlet Omnibus (previewed in this special installment of NGBMO and available in both hardcover and paperback) so haven’t made much headway on other projects.
Sadly, I haven’t found much time or energy to devote to my sketch practice but I’m hoping to get back to that soon. My hands and sanity miss the routine.
Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to the future of NGBMO, future projects, and how I release them. What's been nagging at me, more than ever before, has been the effect online engagement has on how I do my art. Reflecting on it has brought me to considering a severance from having any presence online, including this newsletter.
For some social media brings connection and togetherness. For me it opens the door for anxiety and depression. It feeds all the worst parts of myself and it's time for a change.
I honestly don't have the equipment within me to engage in both this environment and my personal creative environment concurrently without one corrupting the other in some way. I don't know how anyone does.
With that said I think I will be discontinuing NGBMO with issue twelve. After that I'll be collecting all of these essays and entities up for release in book form. There will still be periodic book announcements and dispatches via this channel but it will be otherwise silent after issue twelve.
There will be plenty more art and books. I don't know if I could stop doing that, even if I tried. The only thing that changes is that I won't be doing things the same way I have been for the last few years.
That’s that for this installment of No Gods But My Own. I hope nothing but the best for each and every one of you.
Until next time,
EJM