Pagan Tropers Unite!

Greetings!

Personally, I still live with my Hindu family, but I've always been interested in the mystical. Hell, I even interpret tarot cards from time to time, but not all that seriously.

Anyway, this thread seems very interesting, so I may pop in and ask some questions from time to time, if you don't mind. :) Actually, I have a question now-

How exactly does one communicate with their patron? Is it through dreams, through interpreting signs, or something else? I imagine it would be different for different people, though. Just curious.

Oh look, a ghost!

I meet familiars more than patrons, but I suppose the process is the same...really, imagination. I think people don't like to use that word because it can be a suspiciously mundane thing: what will this piece of furniture look like back at my place, will this article of clothing fit or suit someone not here right now to try it on, what is diaphragm supposed to look like spelled correctly...?

But for me at least there's a similar way to see in your mind, a similar way to generate concepts that occur to you...that do not feel like you, and really have a life of their own, like a waking lucid dream.

Whether that's dissociation or irresponsibility on the part of the one having these experiences, I...actually don't believe matters unless they're harming anyone in the corporeal world (corporeally...I was never against curses or otherworldly journeys undertaken with malice, because I don't believe anyone would do it without legitimate grievance and...it's not a science, so are we/they even really doing it? I'd want to make sure before going on a literal witch hunt. But if someone does something harmful corporeally based on journeys undertaken or messages received or even corporeal phenomena interpreted spiritually...I think there would be a problem there to-do something about!)

Sometimes it's meditation, and yes dreams, or automatic writing, deliberate writing, synchronicities, divination methods...

Officially, I contact my patrons through meditations, but I also can't seem to TURN OFF my spirit-abilities and they basically show up (spiritually) whenever they feel like it. They tend to manifest as voices/sensations.

—
Speaking of meditations, I had a pretty Filipino-flavored meditation last week, where I went to the Philippines and met up with a Filipino dragon/bakunawa. He's very much a sea-serpent and is thankfully one of the few beings who can keep Zeus from being too douche-y around me. Partly because Asian dragons are barely a step below gods, if not actual gods, and also because he's a FILIPINO dragon and doesn't take kindly to attacks on other Filipinos.

His human form is a supernaturally hot and buff Filipino tribesman. Seriously, I turn into an awestruck/drooling groupie seconds after he shapeshifts and this doesn't happen with anyone else. Dionysus and Haku confirmed that "yep, a lot of Eastern dragons do that to people."

Unfortunately, the Bakunawa can't always keep Zeus away because 1) Spirit-Me needs to be in the Philippines so I can summon him (easily), or 2) he needs to be with me when Zeus barges in, and I don't want to be chaperoned with a male companion like it's the medieval times. I sent an email to Magic From Scratch's Thenea since she mentioned she's dealt with my situation of "a deity is actively being a douchebag and refusing to leave me alone" before, so I'm just waiting on her response.

edited 7th May '17 6:13:20 PM by Sharysa

I hope I'm not accidentally stepping on anyone's toes, so to speak, but I've been curious about this thread for some time now, and some of the posts I've seen in here bring up a lot of questions.

So to put it bluntly, what's the deal with all of this? Do you believe that the entities you're speaking with actually are who they appear as, or is it more of an A Form You Are Comfortable With sort of thing?

And again, I don't mean any disrespect, but as the above quote alludes to, whenever people say things along the lines of "the Morrigan helps me with my homework" or "Loki was being rude today, so I asked Thor to chase him off", how am I supposed to interpret that?

I'm assuming that most people around here don't think that the Egyptian god Sobek physically appears in their living room in the shape of a giant crocodile on a regular basis, for example.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

Most communication with the spirits is very much spiritual/non-corporeal. I suppose for me, the gods fit the standards for hallucinations because they're not PHYSICALLY there, but the majority of my "hallucinations" barely do anything that the hallucinations of mental illness actually DO. They mostly walk around with me, acknowledge my prayers, "eat" the food that I give as offerings (and sometimes they eat the colors/smells/feelings I associate with the food), and unless it's an emergency, they try to wait until I'm done with class/errands so they can talk.

Plus, one of them manifests as Dionysus, who is the GOD of mental-illness and is constantly telling me that I'm not crazy.

Let's say that physically, I'm typing this up in the living room on the couch—there's only the TV on and sometimes the neighbors, to explain any "voices" I'd be logically hearing. But in The Otherworld, which is always there in the back of my head, let's say me and Dionysus are there. He's on the couch with me and he looks like Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, but the main differences are his purple/maroon clothes to represent wine, and his supernaturally pretty blue eyes. Dionysus' eyes have a jolt of god-energy in them like his dad Zeus' does, and they practically glow in the dark. He is here, and I talk to him. He just happens to not be corporeal (at the moment).

"I went to the Philippines and met a dragon/bakunawa who can browbeat Zeus into being civil" is similarly literal—I'm not just "reconnecting to my ancestral culture and discovering a new form of spiritual protection," I went to the Philippines in my meditations, I met a dragon, and said dragon helps me bounce Zeus out of my meditations/spirit-home whenever he can.

For me, All Myths Are True and THEN some, because I'm of the "Pop-culture paganism" subculture, which is pretty self-explanatory. Spirits who identify as myriad superheroes, like The Avengers, are one or two steps below deities in terms of power but identify as a whole spectrum of "elite human" vs "god." Aquaman is very specifically the newest incarnation as Jason Momoa, since he's Hawaiian and he really likes my flailing attempts to reconnect with Filipino/Pacific-Islander culture. Marvel-Thor and Marvel-Loki are ENTIRELY separate entities from the deities I already know, because one version of Thor has no ties at all to any incarnation of Loki and has no problem throwing him out of my meditations, while the other is constantly struggling to deal with Marvel-Loki because he has a hard time trying to land a hit on his adopted brother, even if he knows that brother is being a total douche-nugget to a mortal.

Thanks to a lot of emotional baggage from being raised Catholic, the only "myths" that I haven't actually encountered yet are the Abrahamic faiths. Well, I'm still wondering whether I actually met the Capital-G Catholic God one time a few years ago, and whether that terrifying but friendly fire-disc-being who apologized for accidentally burning me around Easter was actually an angel. I still don't say the Abrahamic faiths AREN'T true—I just shrug and let people believe what they like for now.

I think I get it. I was just kind of surprised at first by how much... "less vague", for lack of a better term, that these experiences seem to be compared to those described by people of more mainstream faiths.

How does the pop-culture thing work though? Literary Agent Hypothesis?

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

Dunno about mainstream, but when my family converted to some Pentecostal sect I was in for a huge culture shock, being Catholic previously...Our community would suddenly be so casual about, oh, God told me to not wear those shoes anymore—

And I'd be like...God?! Burning bush that talks, God?? Voice in the darkness calling your name while you try to sleep and you keep thinking is your dad but it's not, God??? Sends messengers beginning their transmission with "be not afraid" because they got four heads and six wings or something, that God did something like that??? So you don't wear the wrong shoes?!??

Nah, it would have been rude to ask it that way, but, canon text precedence, culture shock...I think it was pretty much done the same way a lot of what we call "openheaded" or "spiritworking" pagans feel an intuitive nudge. And call that a voice.

If apprehensiveAcolyte still hangs around here, I followed a podcast on their Gallifrey Tradition that got into the poetics of parallel universes and a possibly controversial opinion that everything fictional originates somewhere liminal and numinous...it's just maybe the context of modern culture corrupts it into entertainment rather than myth and spiritual vision.

And if you must have a cosmological explanation to hold this phenomenon, then I would say that's a good place to start.

But...personally, it "works" because it just happens. I allow for ways to imagine a scene that are not entirely in my conscious control...and, hello Captain Hook giving helpful advice. Why Captain Hook? Hell if I know, but if that message is helpful then who else should care? Okay, I blog about it because I feel like blogging about it, and if I don't set it to private then I guess I expect random literate people to notice and care. Okay, this character remains under copyright of the orphanage Barrie left the rights to after dying. Both of those can cause problems, like, how unlikely is it that a literal cartoon villain can offer anything of spiritual significance, as opposed to mainstream or even better established pagan mythology that has gotten that way because empowerment or enlightenment or something is what these gods are for and Neverland pirates aren't a part of that?

Ehh...but it works for me, however it works. I consider Carl Jung's method of Active Imagination really the best way to parse it. Barbara Hannah's "Encounters with the Soul" is the most lucid and concise, including case studies from antiquity (conversation between a man and his ba, some monk whose name I can't remember talked a daimon into godliness...) Jane Dallet's paper on Active Imagination is very pagan-friendly except for the diligent cautions against believing any external effects can come of this psychological phenomena...which I personally am fine with, although I think for some pagans there's no point otherwise? Ehh, again, it works because it works for me because it happens...no cosmology really needed, as long as it's not hurting anyone in meatspace.

edited 8th May '17 5:47:40 PM by Faemon

This, so very much.

Again, no disrespect, but this kind of attitude is probably one of the hardest things for me to "get" then it comes to this. If someone enters my mind, I won't shut up until they tell me exactly who they are, why they're there, and why I should listen to their advice. Just saying.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

Eh, my ones wouldn't answer, so it kept happening, and didn't otherwise have averse effects. Who they are was as they seemed, they were there because they were there, and I would heed their advice because...if I thought it over, it wasn't horrible advice, and if I did it, things worked out. That doesn't mean I would eschew any responsibility for my decisions, it just means that it didn't come from something that I feel I thought up.

And I don't know if you've ever attempted blank mind meditation, but from that experience I figured that was the way it really is...We have all these voices and impulses that we might not be conscious of, influencing our decisions. We don't usually sit with those to find out what childhood trauma or whatever congealed into a harmful belief and habit that is ruining our lives. But they're always there...and, I figured, "the gods" were just another manifestation of that, experience and consciousness. This is to say that I am God and all my gods...because everybody is, in that same way. And yet, I am not my gods, my small limited conscious ego self, because I still experience them as very dissociated from me: I don't give myself good advice, I hallucinate some amalgamation of ideas I absorbed formed by stories I have read...and then I say, "Hrmm, I'll think about it."

And if it turns out to be some entity from another dimension, well...the experience was the same, the way I treat them is the same, and the advice had the same effect.

Some notes that might be interesting, from a Youtube lecture I watched a year or so back (Grace Nono, ethnomusicologist).

On the dominant understandings of the voice (in the West, the voice has an individual material source, Roman rhetoritician Quintilla says that every being has a voice of their own, Mladen Dolar wrote that we can “unfailingly identify a person by the voice…the voice is like a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable”) Connors notes: Late classical and medieval concept of the body was not an object so much as a dynamism, vulnerable to invasion by other forces and agencies; “insides” and “outsides” produced each other reciprocally, and this was steadily eroded in the 17th and 18th centuries by the notion of the body as an object in a coherent and fixed field, an individual unity by itself. Such a concept of the body, and by extension the voice, was introduced via colonialism to indigenous people in different parts of the world, which modern society now compelled to rid their own bodies and voices of coming and goings of ancestors, deities, and spirits.

So, I suspect this voices/vision stuff just as an experience is...far more common than mystics let on, like you have to be called to it or special or trained. I believe it's likelier that it's become unfashionable in modern society, and then so unfashionable that it became some super special skill when...nah, I think it's originally and still as common as dreaming. Hardly anybody panicks about where those come from, who makes them, why we should see those when we're trying to sleep...right?

That's not what I was expecting, but I think I have a pretty good idea of what you mean.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

It should also be noted that cultural differences WILL SCREW THINGS UP big-time. I was constantly struggling to make sense of why I couldn't turn my Otherworld-vision off and why the spirits were always talking to me, and it turns out that in a lot of indigenous faiths (especially those with heavy ancestor-worship traditions like Asia/Africa/Native-America), having a flock of spirits roaming around with you is nowhere near as uncommon as it is in the Western sphere of religion.

This post is me. Alllllll me. Sure, she's from an African faith and I'm Filipino, and she has visions of the future while I don't, but MOTHER OF GOD, THIS IS ME. Some people have genuine gifts and experience something similar to my "TOO MANY SPIRITS, PLEASE LEAVE OR AT LEAST QUIET THE FUCK DOWN" feelings, but even the relatively "normal" laymen in indigenous faiths have a pretty matter-of-fact relationship with the spirits.

Maybe non-Westerners are just more open to certain things than most Westerners are? I mean, if everyone keeps telling you that God/Deity/Spirit MUST BE TREATED WITH UTMOST CEREMONY AND GREAT IMPORTANCE, you're not going to have the same mindset as someone who was raised with a more casual "hey, [Deceased relative] told me to get some cake because she hasn't had any in a while. I'm going to the store—you need anything?"

You mentioned Jung, Faemon. Is it possible that these entities are symbolic of some unconscious parts of ourselves?

I'd say that it's less about "great ceremony and importance" and more about the reaction to meeting these entities in the first place that confuses me, at least if you believe that they're actually "real" in some way rather than just manifestations of your own mind.

I guess my own experiences with religion might have made me a bit biased, but you'd think that suddenly having confirmation of gods, the afterlife or whatever being real should be... well, more of a big deal than it seems to be to some people.

Sorry if I'm sounding insensitive, but this has been a major pet peeve of mine for the last decade.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

They don't seem to interact with physical objects, though? Are they simply inner guides?

Several spirits have affected me physically, though. Dionysus once got rid of some major stress-related symptoms literally overnight, and a less-quantifiable thing is how he likes getting THAT kind of reaction out of me, seeing as he's my god-husband. I don't usually count that last part as "evidence" because it could basically just be me getting carried away with the Hallucination Who Looks Like Anakin Fucking Skywalker.

Plus the Morrigan once ordered me to stay home and gave my car a flat tire SPECIFICALLY so I'd be stuck at the house for a couple of days. The tires were nowhere near worn out, there was no broken glass or sharp objects that could have accidentally punctured them, and even if I didn't live in the suburbs where tire-slashing is nonexistent, it didn't LOOK like someone slashed my tire with a nice, sharp knife—it looked like some angry creature took a swipe at it. Yet was neither detected by anyone on the moderately-busy street, and was nice enough to leave the rest of my car untouched.

The actual puncture was very small and the shop guy thought I must have driven over a nail by accident, but again: Nails or broken glass lying around isn't common in the suburbs.

edited 9th May '17 1:52:53 PM by Sharysa

I experience them as dissociated and autonomous from me, so I treat them so, but theoretically...yes, I personally lean more towards Jung's collective unconscious archetypes idea than I do towards the multiverse as apprehensiveAcolyte and company said in their podcast.

But! The more I read of early Jungians, the more woo it gets. They determined that inner work was the only "safe" and responsible, ethical way to go about wandering the unconscious...but, because of a collective unconscious, early Jungians believed that witchcraft could be done by accident and not only had, in cases of curses, adverse effects on the target but also on the caster because cursing makes the curse-caster feel like a bad person and not know that that abuse of effective power was what bothered them. (Witchcraft makes the practitioners more unconscious, was what kept coming up.) If I am not mistaken, Jungians also coined the term synchronicity, interpreting waking life in the same way as dreams. They not only believed but took as a given such This Ought To Be A Bigger Deal things such as time travel and telekinesis! By my reading, it simply wasn't as interesting to them as their patient's relationship with the patient's awful parents! Early Jungians were weird.

Going back to Christian mysticism for a moment, if Kat Kerr's sermons are still up on Youtube, there was an interesting anecdote where Kerr got a vision of a deceased relative of a stranger she was talking to. Odd details like purposely off-key renditions of happy birthday, and throwing junk food into this querent's hair. Uncanny, but...Kerr also testified to grand visions of post-op trans people getting overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit and reverting to pre-op bodies through a miracle, and I'm like...not my path, then!

I don't believe the latter will happen, even though I can believe the former verification anecdote were true enough.

Similarly, there was enough woo that was spot-on for my family to stay in church, like my older sibling would feel like going to church on the same day an openheaded friend of the family sends her specifically a text message saying "God misses you." Years later, a whole congregation is praying over our parent who developed a terminal illness, to heal and become living evidence of the miraculous glory of their God...and then our parent died of that illness, and is still dead. My sibling found enough to keep on with that faith, and that's their business (miserable abusive gaslighting drunk that they became to me after, my sibling was so stinking pious)...whereas it simply was never for me, whether I would get consistent verification or not.

It's not a science. I wouldn't expect more reliable results from my fairies than I would from an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient capital-G God who wouldn't so much as grumble if someone under His watch kept bringing Him up as a way to not get called out on abusive behaviour.

I find enough that affects my corporeal life...especially as I, hahahahaha, actively seek it out and cultivate a cognitive bias in that sense...but, largely it's poetics with a very internal effect.

In the cosmology I have formed personally, anyway, the physical world is related to but ultimately a different thing from the cultural world. There are truths of the physical sciences that shouldn't or simply don't have any bearing on societal truths. Physical sciences continue to work the way they do whether people believe it or not, yet for people to know it and be educated, it requires funding and dissemination by people who trust the process enough to invest not only money but the hearts and minds of the next generation. Annoying, but inevitable, and navigation of it is complex.

Spirit stuff is even more removed to me, from all that, but it has touchbacks...but, it's still very much its own thing. Far closer, in my opinion, to poetics (societal, cultural phenomena) than physical sciences, but not necessarily purely and categorically cultural, just maybe closer to that cultural dynamism than to empirical standards that can be put to the spirit stuff.

Frankly, I am firm on the belief that applying scientific standards and processes to spiritual phenomena would cause it to crumble into coincidences and mass delusion (reductively, what culture is)...and if that's one's main thinking tool or mode, there's nothing else for it but to live doing that.

I do consider a loss, there, of a way to articulate fears and aspirations, attribute meaning (the shoulds rather than the is-es), and the sort of poetry that makes the connections and constellations more than "the sum of parts that don't add up" under the lens of materialistic evaluation.

And that can and has been very harmful, this spirit-stuff: witch hunts, holy wars...but I feel that shutting down any religious or spiritual poetics to the ground isn't the way of it either, not that you're doing that, just that if you want to get it on the terms you seem to want to figure it into...first, you don't actually have to! Openheaded spiritworkers are just loopy. (The other factor being, I doubt you or I even can figure it in that way and get it, only because in my experience it's such a different ideological context. Ethos and pathos more than logos.)

edited 9th May '17 3:40:39 PM by Faemon

...and now you've lost me again.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

You may find yourself on a journey of self-discovery, Corvidae.

I believe in you!

I already have a pretty good grasp of who I am and what I believe in. (Took some time and effort though.) It's understanding everyone else that's the journey. I'm working on it.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

Okay. Some reference would help.

I must've had the same feeling reading some textbooks. Perhaps it's me getting used to them that helps me process Faemon's post better.

What I got was this:

• Physical sciences and cultural poetics are two different things. Physical sciences are things working by their own laws regardless of anyone believing in them (like gravity).

• Cultural meanings are constructed by people, who have their own experiences, including spiritual ones. This is because we humans are inevitably meaning-making beings. (For a moment I debated with myself whether to say "creatures" or "machines" and almost said "things".) We automatically and instinctively construct meanings we experience as truths, even when we know we do, especially about our own lives. I don't think, either, that humans can live their whole lives without attributing meaning to something.

• If you try evaluating them on the scientific basis, the result is inevitably reductionistic like with evaluating any human action and experience. Such evaluation may put someone's experience under a microscope, but it nonetheless shouldn't be expected to catch a vivid internal life of someone striving to do important things with one's own life and live as rewardingly and fulfillingly as possible.

• Spiritual experiences can affect how a person experiences the world and acts. A person can get positive benefits like guidance from them. Unfortunately there also have been many times when someone has interpreted them in a way that has ended up in destructive results like the mentioned witch-hunts and holy wars.

edited 10th May '17 3:57:44 PM by MerryMikael

Pretty much. I get the impression that Corvidae wonders that mystic spiritual claims to empirical effects aren't a bigger deal, as though...because if it affects the physical world, it must be subject to physical sciences and thus become a sort of technology. If the Abrahamic God could tell this friend of my family that He missed my sibling going to church at the same time my sibling randomly felt like going to church...this honorary aunt need not have sent a text message, for one, and if consistently proven then this "godphone" stuff should have immense theological impact as well as affecting common understanding of emotions.

But I consider "godphone" phenomena...not that, even though it sounds like it if repeatable consistent empirical evidence to the standard of physical evidence were the baseline of what's accepted as real.

The religious bond between my sibling and my honorary aunt was real...even if they still needed to text message or speak to each other instead of using the godphone. That bond isn't a scientific one. And the event did not convince me to devote myself to a religion so deeply entrenched in patriarchy.

It's not a big deal to me in that sense because a belief system and shared symbolic understanding is simply a part of life. It would probably be a bigger deal to me if anti-witchcraft laws were revived where I live, or theology imposed influence on reproductive health and education concerning evolution and climate change, or a cultural revolution made it so people couldn't wear immodest but practical/comfortable short sleeves when it's hot out or shave if they wanted their chin to feel the air.

Basically I think it's very different, this "big deal because physical scientific discovery impact" versus "big deal because of impact on personal development, relationships, politics and culture".

But I consider godphone stuff to be cultural.

As for Jungians...hrmm, I don't have an exact quote from the lecturer about Carl Jung's I think second or third cousin who was telekinetic (but only when he was in the room, because she had a crush on him) but that's probably in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections which I have not read. Besides, if that was during the age of postwar Spiritualism, seances and such, it would have been stage magic perhaps mixed with collective cognitive bias.

Barbara Hannah's Encounters with the Soul talk about one patient's...basically one patient's dream about time travel. Hannah went sort of "Oh yeah that happened to me once in Paris in the spring of 1913" not in a dream or daydream. Time traveled. And then Hannah was all like, "This client's dad was butts though" (not actual quote) and I was like, "I don't care how butts this patient's dad was! What do you mean, you time-traveled??" (Actual quote.)

But...anecdotal evidence. It was just what they believed, or even, rather, what I believe these early Jungians believed.

And if I'm not mistaken, you view your own beliefs in the same way? It's all just cultural poetics and symbolism? I could understand that just fine, but to be perfectly honest it doesn't sound very religious at all to me.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

What would sound religious to you, though? Under what conditioning did you come to define it in such a way?

There's this sociology paper, Pure Religion and Real Sacrality: Authenticating Religion beyond Institution and Traditions by Dick Houtman, which is an interesting sociological study on the New Age movement in the Netherlands. Houtman touted a controversial conclusion, which was that religion outside of churches would be worthy of examining outside that definition.

I caught it from my roommate who's studying religious systems as part of a Master's in anthropology. So their fellow religious studies classmates went, "Huhwha? Controversial...?" at that sociology paper, because as anthropologists they'd be studying those unchurched-but-still-technically-definitively-religion religions...for which several contexts had already been established.

Weber, Durkheim (*shakes fist at sky, shouting angrily* DUUURRRKHEIIIIIM!), Geertz, Asad...each spearheaded a different school of thought regarding the anthropological definition of a religion, and they build on and disagree with each other fiercely. There's some I haven't remembered to name, so it's very pluralistic. Especially as I know nothing of what's going on among sociologists.

If religion is defined by an insider rather than an academic outsider...then, wouldn't all I need to do is say, "The study of cultural poetics is my religion." And it would be?

Among some pagans online that I have followed, there was an idea I liked of orthopraxy (following shared ritual or routine customs) rather than orthodoxy (attempt to control correct interiority of beliefs and feelings: mainstream state religions can manage that, alternative religions less likely to.)

If you define religion as churched, as institutionalized, as established over several generations past, traditional, historical, communal, involving reverently zealous devotion and ecstasy and (absolute must!) literalism of belief...then, I don't suppose that I would be religious to you, but I would remain religious and pagan to myself (and anyone who would agree to acknowledge and validate that.)

I do not, so you can drop that line of thought right away.

This part is a bit trickier though. It's hard to come up with a good definition, and there's obviously going to be a lot of variation and different levels of conviction involved, even within the same belief system.

At the very least though, I would expect a religion to contain some kind of actual, faith-based belief, whatever that might end up being. Hanging out with gods that you yourself think are imaginary (sorry if I'm misinterpreting you) sounds like something very different to me. Please note that I don't mean to imply that this is somehow "bad" or "less important" or whatever. I've even done something similar to that a few times myself.

At the end of the day though, this is all for the benefit of my own mental categorization whatever-you'd-call-it, and you obviously have no obligation to care.

Still a great "screw depression" song even after seven years.

Okay, so while I was job-hunting again, I asked the Bakunawa for (more) help getting a job and Shang of all people lost his shit at the gods.

I mentioned a while back that Shang's the most adorably stereotypical "stickler for rules" Asian guy, but while he was checking up with me about my current life/issues, he suddenly took a long look at me, saw whatever spirits see with their telepathic/seer abilities, and started demanding to know why the fuck the gods have been letting me stay so miserable.

So Macha explained to Shang that they want me to stay safe and Shang went "WHITE GIRL, PLEASE! THERE IS A TIME AND PLACE FOR KEEPING HER SAFE, AND IT'S NOT WHEN THAT'S MAKING HER MISERABLE! IT'S NOT TEENAGER-MISERABLE BECAUSE OF HORMONES! SHE'S A FUCKING ADULT AND SHE'S BEEN ASKING YOU ALL FOR HELP, BUT YOU KEEP CHICKENING OUT BECAUSE OF HER SHIT LIFE-PATTERNS AND THINKING SHE'S GONNA DIE BEFORE SHE'S THIRTY AGAIN. SHE'S IN THE FUCKING SUBURBS NOW! WHAT'S SHE IN DANGER OF WHEN SHE MOVES OUT, BEING STUCK IN TRAFFIC???"

Literally, that is what he's felt like since a little before lunch. All-caps and lots of swearing. At all but three gods, and even two of those haven't been helping their cases with all the tiny not-quite-lies to make me feel better.

Clearly the gods aren't ACTIVELY trying to keep me from getting a job or moving out, but they're not exactly speeding things along either. When Macha argued that they love me and Shang makes it sound like they're just letting me stew in my rut, the Bakunawa came and told her that "Of course you all love her! That's the fucking PROBLEM!"

Like... mother of god. I did not expect the Asian spirits to start talking back to the gods when I asked for "more Asian spirits" to come around.