3 Simple steps for making friends with divinity

A means for building a meaningful relationship with a god or gods

Looked over my ko-fi account recently and it occurred to me that a follower asked me to write about forming a bond with divinity, like, a year ago. Being that I’ve done nothing much magical lately and leaned hard on pop-occulture posts and self-promotion of my ongoing horror RPG (for real, though. It’s great.) I thought it was high time to get back to some Great Work posting.

This time of year is always a little rough for me. These are the days leading up to my sobriety anniversary. This year will make five years on the straight edge. An alcoholic junkie no more. It also coincides with a repeating pattern of unemployment. Seems like this time each year, no matter where I’ve worked for the last five years the company either ceases to be a company or I end up laid off. Nowadays, my bond is strong with the divine by way of capital-G God but it took me a long time to summon the courage to reach for that. I lived in the shadow of Catholicism for most of my life and even though it never got its hooks in me the way that it did some of my friends who remain faithful to Rome to this very day, Catholicism lingers in me like a bad taste in my mouth that no amount of brushing will relieve. I suppose that’s why the Johannite path ultimately appealed to me because it put Christianity in my hands in a way both familiar and without burden. Combining faith in divinity with my annual need for a new job and money in the bank to pay my bills was one of the first ways in which I meaningfully came to understand the role that a higher power plays in our lives. It also helped me get clean since Step 2 in the AA/NA programs is Come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. Once I stopped being such an asshole about higher powers a million doors opened up for me on the road to recovery and stability and so I offer my first clumsy overtures toward doing so in hopes that I night help someone else that needs to hear it.

Myself as an example

Lead by example, I believe, and for whatever reason, back in 2016 the pantheon which resonated with me the most was that of Hinduism. Call it whatever you like, but I always believed that echoes of the past find their way to us through the path of least resistance. Spirit moves like water or electricity so if something keeps appearing to you in your life, do yourself a favor and listen to it. In this case, as I stumbled around chaos magic I found myself, again and again, confronted with the gods and goddesses of India. I was struggling to find a way to destroy the demons in my life and get through some seriously dark times.

1. Meditate

I always set aside fifteen to twenty minutes to sit in quiet contemplation. I’d set the intention to find higher powers that would aid me in this. Though most of the time I was sitting quietly, banishing the chattering monkey of the mind, on these days I’d simply let my mind wander along a certain theme and see what came back. It was like calling out into the darkness and seeing what answered. I had obstacles to overcome and the first name that came to me was Ganesh. Sometime later, I meditated thinking about the demons in me that had to be tamed and if they couldn’t be tamed, they had to be destroyed. The goddess that came to mind at these times was Durga. And finally, I needed work. My wife came home and suggested that I work with Fortuna on the same day that my meditation questing led me to the foot of Lakshmi and I took this to be a pretty strong sign in favor.

2. Learn about them

Their power is nothing if you don’t know anything about them. Entire cultures have poured energy into these beings to make them real and the more that I read about Ganesh, the more I learned about the others and that aforementioned spiritual circuitry lent to me some sort of ancestral memory of past lives which caused that power to resonate with me. There’s a million websites dedicated to these beings. There are teetering stacks of books in every language about them and often times their stories are wild! The Mahabharata is long as hell but it’s a real page turner due to the Hindu belief cycle reading like Dragon Ball Z. Gods are always flying around, using weapons that vaporize entire nations in a single shot. Gods spend aeons training like Goku and then they spend just as long powering up these new abilities before they unleash them in crazy exciting ways. The story of Durga was something that really spoke to me: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva needed to kill this demon they were powerless to stop, so they combined their powers like a Fusion Dance and their combined power produced this woman who then rode ahead to fight the demon, Mahisasura. She was this terrifying force of defiance that charged in on the back of tiger with ten arms wielding ten weapons. The demon pulled a Frieza and threw everything it had at her and she shrugged it all off like it was no big deal. The demon declared, “NANI? KORE WA BAKANA DESU!” right before she whipped its ass for good.

This was precisely what I needed in my life at the time. Coming in from a serious break in sanity, hating your own guts, and feeling like no one in your life will ever trust you again and also looking at your own demons standing before you, grinning like they fucking won… Man. I needed a demon slayer in my life and her influence was powerful in overcoming them.

3. Celebrate them

The most powerful gods are the ones best remembered but memory isn’t everything. They receive sustenance from our faith in them. In the Hindu tradition, each one of them has a series of prayers and mudras to invoke their names and shower them with praise. Most of them have feast days dedicated to them similar to the way Saints are venerated in Catholicism. I learned a mudra and several prayers for Ganesh, Durga, and Lakshmi and I performed them in a daily ritual. As I was looking for work I created a small altar space in my bedroom to them. I put photos of them on it behind a plate and on the plate I left offerings of oranges and red flowers. Every day I lit sweet incense, vibrated their names three times and said a prayer to each, making the mudra gesture for each one with my hands. I really wanted to get serious about this and tried to learn how to say the prayers in Hindi but I spent more time stumbling through the prayers than I did saying them and felt that I losing energy by trying to be complete in my worship of them. Ultimately, I thought it was more important to express myself in English to best get my intention across. Offerings are always a good thing for any god and some of them are pretty simple. In the case of Lakshmi I would also leave a coin on the plate for her. I still do this from time to time. A framed illustration of Lakshmi hangs on the wall in my bedroom and I occasionally toss a coin to my Witcher. I believe the first AA coin I ever got is still up there as a tribute.

Did it work? Yep. As soon as I started doing this work while looking for work my unemployment ended abruptly. Now, like I said, a year later I was back in the unemployment line but I have written in the past about how magic do be like a monkey’s paw from time to time. But the bare fact remains: We are a reflection of them and they are a reflection of us. We’re the ones who give them faces, names, and power. The relationship is like looking in a mirror. You get out of it what you put into it.

Getting to know gods and goddesses, Christ and Capital-G God, has put tremendous power in my hands to drive me toward successful ends or manifest the things that I need. These are the most meaningful and powerful experiences that I’ve had as a magician. To such a point, in fact, that I regret having taken as long as I did to come around.

I’m interested in your particular practice and the relationships your’ve formed. Don’t hesitate to drop a message in the comments and subscribe for more.