There was a question recently about the nature of spirits. Specifically, how much we should be attributing human-like personalities or characteristics onto spirits. Are relationships with spirits like human relationships? Or are spirits more like forces of nature that we can attune ourselves to?
Different practitioners land at different places on this spectrum. Some view their relationships with spirits as deeply personal and grounded. Some even go so far as to perform intimate acts or marriages with spirits. On the other end of the spectrum are practitioners that view spirits as forces or nature, or mental archetypes, or some other conception that would be impossible to develop a real relationship with. Which one is correct?
I’m going to preface the remainder of this post by saying, there’s really no way to know. Spirituality, and esotericism in general, is all about direct engagement and personal experience. Everything that follows is my own belief, and after exploring things for yourself you may decide I’m full of shit and you believe something totally different. That’s cool.
Having now disclaimed, I think this is a complex topic, and the right answer (as with all things) is probably somewhere in the middle.
There is a definite risk in projecting too many human attributes onto spirits. Think about the difference in consciousness and experience between humans and, say, gorillas. Or dolphins. We can guess the differences are massive, but can’t get a more precise comparison because their experiences are so dissimilar from ours as to defy understanding. And that’s for carbon-based, mammalian life forms on the planet Earth. With spirits we’re talking about entities at home in entirely different planes of reality. They have modes of existence and consciousness that are so different from our own as to be literally unimaginable. Not just beyond our current understanding, but entirely beyond the scope of what we could possibly conceive of. Treating such an alien consciousness like it wants to be your roommate is, frankly, sort of weird.
But recognizing a spirit as a consciousness is key there. As a human, the conscious entities we are most used to interacting with are other humans.1 And we’re good at it. We have pretty good mental models of humans, and are able to predict the way other people will act with a reasonable degree of fidelity. When engaging with non-human entities, using our tailored-for-humans mental models is… probably as good as we can hope to get.
When in doubt about how I should engage with a spirit, I generally fall back to how I would deal with a human, and for the most part it works out pretty well for me. That means being generally respectful: neither pompously domineering nor gratingly obsequious. It means not ceding my agency in my own life to a spirit, and not expecting them to cede their agency to me.
Approximating a spirit as human-like is generally a reasonable approach, provided you keep in mind that it’s an approximation. Even if most of the time it works, every once in a while you will run across a case that trips you up. Miscommunications happen sometimes, with people and with spirits.
All of which is pretty abstract. “Treat spirits like people except when they’re not” isn’t super helpful advice. So where do we go from here?
Ultimately, I think the metric you should be using to judge your spiritual or magical practice is by the impact it has on your mundane life. If the mode you are using to engage with the unseen is strengthening your ability to operate in everyday life – if it is supporting those areas where you need to be supported, healing those areas where you need to be healed, and helping you build relationships with other humans – then it’s all to the good. If, on the other hand, it is hindering your ability to operate in the material world – if it causes you to struggle managing your time or money, or to disconnect from the people around you, or to replace real experiences with mental ones – then it’s time for a shift.
We should be building tools, not dogmas. The goal of all of this is to call forth the best version of you than can be.
- I would contend this is still true even for animists, who view every object as having a consciousness. ↩︎