Today we consider 30 Days of Devotion question, “What is the worst misconception about this deity that you have encountered?”
Kyaza’s blog on the same topic today is a tough act to follow–there’s so much covered. Loki is immensely versatile and controversial. Do read it! I do have some additional thoughts, though. But first, a fractal.
In my opinion, the following misconceptions are not exactly “the worst” but merely the most limiting.
Misconception 1: Loki is not real.
Oh my droogies! The entire history of our sad species is one of collision with and confusion about those mostly (but not always) unseen beings we call gods and goddesses, demons, angels, fey folk, ghosts, ancestral spirits, and so on.
A departed friend of mine, Michael Rossman of Free Speech Movement fame, was a mathematician and naturalist, as well as a social historian, poet, player of flute, and science teacher of children. His inner world was filled with numbers and mathematical equations, as well as a pronounced empathy with plant life. Yet he’d had his own brushes with “the strange” from quite early on, including his experience with the first weeks of the Free Speech Movement as a collective possession by the spirit of Liberty. Literally, spirit possession. Micheal knew what it was to be spirit-touched, and changed.
In Rossman’s book, New Age Blues–On The Politics of Consciousness (E.P. Dutton, 1979), he recounts bizarre twists in the ’70s pop phenomenon of Uri Geller (bender of spoons) and his patron impressario, a scientist named Andrija Puharich (physician and parapsychological researcher). Their combined wyrd soon became weirder and weirder, ending with servitude to a group of spirit beings called “The Nine” or “Hoovans.” Michael writes: “like many more sober investigators I have come to take seriously the notion that there are discrete intelligences at hand other than those housed in fleshy bodies, and that they interact with us in quite complex ways.” For the rest of his life, Michael would pursue his own investigations via entheogens (so not all that sober) and later in our joint exploration of “the gossamer realms” (his words) via tantric gazing.
Just one more word from Michael, “Weird things are abrew…and I think it is much the better part of intellectual humility to recognize what we have no way of knowing, and to confess our guesses as projections of our wishes.”
Well, yes and no to those “projections,” Michael. There’s intellectual knowledge, true, and we need it for discernment, but there’s also spontaneous gnosis, which sometimes slams into us with the force of a truck. I have this and that and this Loki thing too. And other incidents as well. Until recently, I didn’t want or shape what happened. I didn’t go looking. It’s only in the last four years that I truly stepped into my rightful state as a witchy polytheist animist and have intentionally courted a select few of the gossamer realm.
Loki was a surprise. I’d been courting Frey, Freya, and Gerda via daily devotions, but not getting much back. Then Loki arrived with the force and allure of a shiny red sports car, immensely present. I could have said no but I didn’t.
You bet he’s real. I am also a sober investigator. I don’t oath myself to fantasies. But I understand, it sounds really bonkers if you’ve never had a similar experience.
He is known by his/her/zir/their faces and attributes and our community’s shared gnosis is confirms quite a lot of what we come to as individuals.
Misconception 2: Loki is male.
I do feel and respond to Loki as “male” most of the time, but lately I’ve begun to find my way to the other gendered aspects. I’ve always known these other aspects were there, and that intellectual knowledge is part of Loki’s appeal for me, but actually feeling into this, that’s new.
Here’s a song that reminds me of Loki, Herself.
Lady Of The Lake 