A Reluctant Guide to Making Friends with Spirits

If you've followed me for a while or stumbled upon specific tweets, you may have seen me occasionally describe interacting with various types of entities in a way that makes me seem like a medium or insane.

This report slash reluctant guide will explain exactly what I mean by "earth elemental serpent thing" or more generally "entities", or “spirits”, how I think about them, why I engage with them, and how exactly I do that.

(You may be reading this with skepticism considering I showed you a tweet where I discuss hallucinogenic substances. This is intentional. My experiences with entity contact have mostly occurred when completely sober, and the use of hallucinogenic substances has interesting intersections with entity contact experiences that are worth exploring in detail.)

Around here, we take our phenomenology seriously

To put everything I'm about to say into its proper context, it's important to understand that my epistemic practice essentially boils down to taking my phenomenology seriously. (If you haven't, I highly recommend reading this post before moving forward.)

There's a tendency for the mainstream, materialist-trained mind to immediately reduce anything "weird" or uncomfortably paranormal-seeming to its base material components in the hopes that being reductive will make the weird go away: dreams are just random neurons firing as a result of the brain cleaning process, thoughts that seem like not our own are just a result of an overactive imagination, absurd synchronicities with personal relevance to our lives are funny coincidences. For the most part, this works. It protects us from tangling with an entire range of experiences most people are unequipped to navigate.

I go in the opposite direction. That is, I observe the various sensations of my personal experience in a judgment-free manner, observing and memorizing what it feels like in order to analyze it in more rational, discursive modes later.

As it turns out, if you lean into this, especially as it relates to the apparent "voices", "impressions", "feelings" that seem to arrive from somewhere else, it gets really weird.

I know you want the good stuff--what it's like--so let's jump in.

What is entity contact like?

The experience of entity contact varies widely from relatively minimal such as thoughts, emotional reactions, physical sensations, and mind's eye visualizations, to full on auditory or visual hallucinations. My understanding is that the latter are uncommon, and I've only experienced a mild auditory hallucination once.

The key defining features that make these impressions notable as entity contact in my opinion are:

• Thoughts that don't seem like our own, having a different emotive "tone"

• Thoughts that appear fully-formed, out of nowhere

• Thoughts that have information we don't have access to or have never thought about

• Feelings, sensations, and visualizations that appear suddenly in the mind or body, with no relation to our current mental/emotional/physical state

• The distinct impression of a presence in your physical space

• Full-on, overwhelming transcendent spiritual/religious experiences

There are a few ways to judge these experiences as more concrete as entity contact as opposed to imagination, such as having multiple people report the similar experience and characteristics of a given entity without having discussed it prior, or an entity providing information about another person that you did not know which is later verified as correct.

Generally entity contact occurs most frequently during practices and rituals that emphasize mental and emotional receptivity to experience. "Rituals" are essentially "spiritual technology" which, through the utilization of acts or items of symbolic meaning, prayer, meditation, and petition, enable one to circumvent the rational mind. This is a vast oversimplification of the ritual process, but the main point is that you can use various tools and techniques to enter an altered state of consciousness that is more suited to listening to the subtle (and occasionally not-so-subtle) impressions that arise.

These ritual practices also serve as a way to put out a "signal" for these entities. However, rituals with the specific aim of making entity contact are not strictly required. I've had experiences which in retrospect I would classify as entity contact that occurred during meditation and various internal awareness practices where I was not expecting it to occur. It's also happened completely randomly in normal waking consciousness, although these experiences are often mixed and blended with my own subjective state so they are especially difficult to tease out.

This is a good segue point to discuss the idea of receptivity in more detail, as well as the intersections with psychedelics.

How does entity contact work?

I've described my basic epistemic perspective for handling encounters with these experiences. After enough entity contact, the logical next step is either to A) construct a materialist framework by which nothing you experienced has any special significance besides psychosis (more on that later) or B) try to map these experiences to the countless accounts of the nature of these entities and the realities they inhabit, alongside healthy doses of both speculation and skepticism. You can probably guess which one I did.

This is where we enter the realm of the strange and difficult or impossible to verify. I'll give you a summary of my understanding of how this all works, according to various spiritualists, religious texts, and my personal intuition. This will be a lot to take in at once if you have a materialist mindset, so keep in mind that as I discuss, these are frames that help us understand how to make entity contact more effectively. By doing so, we may be able to learn more about ourselves and the vast reality we seem to inhabit, forming a virtuous cycle of increasing self- and other-knowledge.

Synchronicity and sympathy

First, we must explore the metaphysics of synchronicity and sympathy. I've written a thread in the past on my working metaphysics that I use to make sense of my experiences, but this will be a more coherent summary of the points salient to entity contact.

You've experienced synchronicities before as "funny coincidences" or serendipity, like when you think about someone you haven't thought of in years and they text you the next day, a song comes on that is singing precisely what you're feeling, or a stranger reaches out with a solution to a problem you've just started trying to solve.

Sympathy, as in "sympathetic magic", is the esoteric idea that like attracts like. Whatever you are thinking, feeling, or doing is putting out something into the subtle strata of reality which attracts more of the same to you. This is a fundamental principle of magic that explains various phenomena including synchronicity, why people tend to experience life in a way that confirms their outlooks, and of course, entity contact.

Creation, emanations, and vibration

All of this is enabled by the metaphysical idea that the nature of reality is actually "mind first". Essentially, this means that all physical reality actually followed the expression of a first, all-powerful mind, which for our purposes is an absolute creator figure such as the god depicted by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Any absolute creator figure will do, honestly, and I'll leave the explanation of how precisely this happened to the theologians and mystics, but the essential idea is that the curious desire of this unbounded, formless, infinite creator entity could not be satisfied in its undivided form. A perfect thing cannot change, and without change there is no experience. This first desire for experience on part of the creator caused infinite universes and infinite planes¹ to manifest into existence, with the lower and more tangible being the physical plane we live on.

By "lower", I am referring both to the (theoretical, as we have no way to measure it) distance from the first divine source and the idea of a "lower vibration" that you'll frequently hear from new age circles. There's a lot of parallels to the concept of vibration, frequency, and resonance reflected in the world of physics, but the fundamental idea is that the absolute creator is the highest, "infinite" vibration, while vibrations slow down and become more and more "dense", until it results in our physical reality. On the non-physical, higher vibration planes, things supposedly happen instantly via telepathy and means of nonlocal travel which are impossible according to our contemporary understanding of physics.

Even though the physical plane we live on is a far slower, lower, and denser vibration, it is still first and foremost "of mind". This is what enables things like synchronicity and sympathetic magic to work: this physical reality is fundamentally illusory in its apparent limitation, although we can't perform physics-defying acts simply because our plane's mechanics of activation are too slow to allow for it. However, we can, through various spiritual technologies, learn to send out a signal that resonates with the types of entities we would like to contact. If reality is of the mind, that means that our minds are our interfaces with all of reality, if we learn how to tune them to the right frequency.²

Receptivity, distortion, and resonance

This brings us closer to practical matters which are very important in this practice. Notably, successful entity contact requires a clear enough "channel" for entities to communicate clearly, and the channel is your mind and body. If you aren't in a receptive state, entities have difficulty finding you, and even if they do find you, you likely won't be able to "hear" them or properly parse what they're saying in the midst of your own subjectivity. Unless an entity is powerful enough to come to visual materialization or emit literal noise, which seems to be very rare, you are the only channel they have. Yielding space within oneself is important in order to let something else project there.

The communication from entities can also be distorted by our personalities and emotional positions. For example, if you tend to be very hard on yourself, the communication that you receive will frequently come through this filter. If you are overwhelmingly optimistic, entities' messages will be colored that way, too. We are the instrument of communication, so the way we are affects the message we hear, like a light trying to shine through a clouded prism, only allowing some colors through.³

I have found the metaphysical concept of "distortions" from the very strange and fascinating channeled work The Law of One to be helpful in thinking about this phenomenon. A distortion is any change in the self away from the awareness that one is fundamentally connected to everything and part of the divine one's cosmic dance. There are useful distortions, like thinking that we're people so we actually go about and do people stuff; but there are compulsive and maladaptive distortions, like believing one is unworthy of receiving communication from entities, or even that all entities must be universally tender and loving and good (a "light and love" distortion). The goal is not to dissolve every distortion, but to identify and extricate yourself from the throes of the ones that dominate your mind and heart. This allows you to create distance from them when you are making entity contact, and identify messages that have likely been filtered through your distortions. The more this is done, the more brilliant the prism of your mind becomes, and the more lucidly and clearly you can receive communication.⁴

Just as distortions change the tone and even content of entity communications, they can also cause us to accidentally put out a signal to entities who resonate with them. Many psychics and mediums I have spoken with seem to take it as a matter of fact that both positive and negative entities exist, and can be drawn to us by resonance with our emotional expression. This can be a particular problem for people with strong psychic tendencies or sensitivity, because they can actually experience these entities' influence more strongly. This means it's especially important that one does not intentionally initiate entity contact while in a bad mood, grieving, feeling anxious or fearful, etc. But there is an upside to this. If we reach entities by means of resonance, when we are in a neutral-positive space, we know that no harmful entities can come through. Additionally, there are practices we can use that ensure we are protected, even if we aren't in the clearest mindset.

Discernment and psychedelics

As you can probably imagine, entity contact can be an incredibly subtle practice. For me, I had to get to know my own thought patterns very well and learn what they actually felt like, while struggling with incredible doubt and materialist embarrassment about the whole thing. But over time it got easier to trust the experience and the process and focus on the truly difficult task of discernment.

Given that you often have no way to verify external entity contact unless something in explicit reality is actively discussed, it requires a delicate balance of several factors to judge. Did this communication feel different from my own thoughts? Is there a reason I might fabricate this at this moment? Could I fabricate this? Does it correctly coordinate with other information I might have received from this particular entity? Can I confirm this with other divination systems I trust more than my chattering mind, such as the tarot? (Wait, how does tarot work? That's a whole 'nother bag of worms.) Sometimes you've got nothing to go on but your gut and more information from future communications. To make it even more complicated, depending on how reactive your mind is during entity contact, your thoughts will sometimes merge into the entity's communications, overeagerly filling in details in the middle of a sentence that would otherwise be completely coherent.

However, discerning all of this gets easier as you build trust in your experiences, have external information verified, and learn to still the mind. If you develop frequent communication with an entity, it becomes very easy to identify them in your mind. This has its own drawbacks, which requires clear containers around entity contact.

There's yet another layer of discernment we can voluntarily engage with: psychedelics. Many people have spiritual awakenings during psychedelic experiences where they report engaging with entities they are convinced are real. Skeptics will naysay this and say it's merely the acid talking; after all, if the wall is melting, how can that angel be real? But in our reality-as-mind framework, LSD both produces reality-bending visual hallucinations but also opens our mind's receptivity to entity contact, who can use our hallucinations to present themselves. This becomes a deeper layer, distinguishing between raw hallucination and the presentation of entities. The usual questions apply, but we have the added challenge of seeing through what is incidental to the hallucinogenic experience and recognizing whether or not what we are seeing is actually external to ourselves.

Despite these challenges, hallucinogens facilitate such easy access to and memorable intensity of entity contact that one might choose to utilize them. Of course, any discussion of the usage of hallucinogens or illegal substances throughout this writing is completely fictional and should be read in a highly disapproving tone.

My experiences with various types of entities

Here I'll describe a number of my own entity contact experiences, ranging from extremely mild and uninteresting to full on transcendent spiritual experiences. After that, a section on how you can try it for yourself, with plenty of disclaimers.

Note: the first few examples are from before I understood the importance of energetic hygiene.

Swooping tarot entity

Sometime in 2017 I was heavily researching everything I could find on entities and spirits and doing daily energy visualizations. During a tarot reading for myself, my eye abruptly darted to the space to the upper left of the tarot board. I felt like something was swooping in from that space over the tarot spread with an almost mischievous energy, offering to help me. I felt like I was just making it up, though, figuring I was all spooked from my constant research. I cut it off pretty quickly, and told it to get lost. It felt like it gave the telepathic equivalent of a shrug and meandered off.

At the time I figured this to be overactive imagination, but upon reflection it had decent markings of legitimate entity contact: being interrupted by something outside myself, resonance with unknown entities due to my constant research and energy practices, and an emotional state (mischievousness) I didn't identify with or like.

Breathing thing

During the same period, I was meditating for one or two hours a day, alternating between energy visualization and empty mind practices. As I was doing an empty mind meditation in a chair near a wall, I began to hear breathing behind me. Not in my mind, but actually hearing the sound of breath right behind me.

It sounded like it was coming from something large, slightly above me. The breath was even in pace, and somehow it felt completely neutral, indifferent toward me, except for it being there, watching me. Trying to be a diligent meditator, I ignored it, but it continued for a good 30 seconds until I decided to turn around and look. As I did, the sound faded away, and there was nothing behind me (and there wasn't enough space for there to be in the first place).

Crow being in the bedroom

Also in 2017, I had been doing a large amount of research on demons in order to understand what they actually are, the various conceptions of them, and if they actually exist, including the Goetic demons. I'm falling asleep when I wake up with a foreboding feeling and a sense that there was something at the foot of my bed. In my mind's eye I groggily see a large, cloaked figure with a massive raven or crow's head.

I was resistant to this and waved it off as my imagination, got up and woke myself up, turning on all of the lights and proceeding to do clearing white light visualizations. Later, I would look up raven-headed demons and find Malphas, a "Great President of Hell". Nothing hellish happened after, but it was interesting to find the external corroboration.

Jupiter spellwork

Entities can manifest themselves not just through telepathy but also through events, omens, and occurrences, especially if we reach out to them through symbolic means. In a metaphysical model of the world being made of mind first, we can use heightened states and symbolic reasoning in order to communicate across the subtle membrane behind our apparent physical reality. This is one form of what you might call magic--deliberate, applied magical thinking.

In 2019 I was becoming very interested in poker and games of chance with edges at the same time I was learning more about the planets and magic. The planets are useful because they are named after gods which have their own associations--Jupiter, especially, having to do with luck, victory, success, and rewards in general.

So, on the principle of resonance, I created a sigil (a piece of writing condensed and reformed into a piece of artwork, abstracted away from the original intention) that looked similar to Jupiter's glyph, during the hour of Jupiter (every hour is assigned to a specific planet), and listening to loud, bombastic music with lots of brass at high volume. I focused on the sigil (intention: have luck at poker) and let myself feel and know that the intention behind it was dispersing into the universe. The entire process took 9 minutes.

Two hours and some minutes later at exactly 1:00 PM, I receive an extremely strange spam message to my work email entitled "crossby", from "cloude research <clouderesearch7877@gmail.com>", whose contents was "zeusliving" 24 times in a row then "check this" with no link in sight.

I couldn't find anything satisfactory online about this email, "zeusliving", "crossby", or "cloude research". It shook me; even though I was playing with these metaphysical ideas and seeing results with timid prods at magic, this was the first time I directly involved a planet. At the time, I didn't understand that invoking a planet's nature is actually also a form of communication with that planet, or perhaps the god associated with it.

In general, if one is interested in entity contact, I recommend working with an amenable planet.⁵ I had learned that astrology can be an essential tool for timing ideal communications with the planets, and by this this time had undertaken intensive and constant study, which is relevant for our next example.

Journeying and meeting an angel

In late 2020 I was learning about journeying, or using the imagination as a means of navigating the subtle planes which the mind can intersect when in the right state due to the mind-first nature of reality.

I had no particular goals in mind, but wanted to try it out. I laid in bed imagining a dark space occupied only by a shimmering white ellipse flanked by dark curtains, beyond which I "saw" vast rolling hills. I entered through and was surrounded with those green slopes and a pure white sky. A figure approached me who seemed to be "flickering" between multiple states, which I blamed on my poor visualization and concentration skills. It seemed to be alternating between an archetypal crone figure, normal woman, and something else, until settling into the form of a beautiful goddess-like figure in white wearing a circlet.

She said something like "about time you got here", and I shrugged because I had no idea who she was or what she was talking about. I asked her name and she said "Tamiel", but I thought she must have actually said "Tamriel", a continent from the Elder Scrolls video game series, and I was very skeptical. She offered to help stabilize my image and I agreed, and she touched my forehead. I felt a rushing, tingling sensation throughout my body but mostly focused on my head⁶. The visualization itself stabilized but I was tired and still losing concentration; she seemed to agree, transformed into a hawk or an eagle, and flew away.

Later I looked up the name "Tamiel", and found that it it's the name of an obscure fallen angel from the book of Enoch who evidently taught astronomy to humanity. Which, of course, in biblical times, would be considered one and the same with astrology.

Marijuana deva

A friend had once recommended trying to speak to the deity or deva associated with marijuana. I wrote this experience out as a twitter thread, but I'll summarize here. I decided I'd go ahead and try meditating while smoking, considering at the time I was using pot in very high quantities. I did a full head-on-hands-on-floor prayer, and improvised a greeting to the pot deva, something like:

"An ardent prayer to the spirit and deva of marijuana,
that which heals us,
that which holds us in its warmth,
that which brings us joy,
I bring regal greetings and contact
and a request to join you for a while"

As I finish I sense a jovial, playful sort of energy. (By "energy" I mean--imagine the feeling you get with a particularly clever and funny friend which seems to emanate off of them, but they aren't there.) I take one hit off of half a bowl and sit in my meditation pose and breathe in. I sit there for a while and feel like the energy is inviting me to smoke more, almost saying, "You want us? Then come get us!" and staying back, just out of reach. I feel silly and a little worried I won't stay clear enough to interpret, but figure that if it's the pot deva, that's probably the point.

I experience very intense stimulation in my third eye area, and intense tingling sensations throughout my entire body. As this happens, I have the vague sense arise in my mind's eye of being a thin sliver of light in the massive ring that is the deva. I begin to overimagine, reset and let myself receive, and then I see the ring again, but now it's made up of angel wings, millions of them, some of them having eyes. They are arranged in rings, sometimes loops, which collapse in on each other impossibly but the wings in the blackness fold in upon each other to create new ones.

I take a small break to tweet and read some of the replies. Many of them are from people who have also had encounters with the pot deva and encouraged me that she is very friendly, very Venusian (flirtatious, charming, and seductive). I come back to it with a more relaxed pose after lazing about while tweeting, and it mirrors me with a Venusian laziness, and a seductive "voice" (in my mind) says something like, "So, you want to go deeper?" I feel legitimately charmed, and think, "Yes." As I'm sitting there I also begin thinking, what if those other replies influenced my mood and I'm just making this up?⁷

Then, I have a realization. The deva, if it exists (and it feels here), is just reflecting one fragment of itself to mirror my state. So I can understand it. And then, boom. This is not such a profound cognitive realization, but something about it ran into the core of my self like an explosion. My mind breaks. I suddenly realize the sheer power and scale of the deva, and how much it contains within it, and how infinite and massive it is. In my mind's eye I see an infinitely large spinning orb of brilliant light with oscillating striations. I feel incredibly small. My mind reels and I feel vertigo, and I start hyperventilating. I began to worry that I would truly lose it, pummeled by the incomprehensible vastness of the thing before me. Until I (we?) remind us to breathe, and I take those deep breaths, and I feel something tenderly pull me out, slow me down, and withdraw itself.

I want to weep with gratitude and humility. I say thank you, and I meekly ask if I can be alone. The deva departs lovingly. After, I'm exhausted and shaken. I had the first genuine "religious" experience of my life. It took 30 minutes. At the time I had a very high tolerance, so half a bowl was relatively nothing for me. I even smoked more afterwards to calm my nerves and the experience was completely normal as usual. The only difference here was the explicit request and asking which yielded a staggering encounter.

Psilocybin earth serpent

I did not take detailed notes of this encounter, but will recollect the broad pieces I recall now that you've got the sense of these sorts of experiences.

In October 2021 I ate a white milk chocolate bar made of psilocybin mushrooms which did not go down particularly smoothly. I spent an hour or two rolling around clutching my stomach until I got the sense of something being with me, a subtle but sturdy, calm, soothing energy somewhere slightly above and to the left of my bed. In a mushroom-enhanced state I opened myself to any impressions and sensed the image of a floating, dark green serpent. It offered to help me with my stomach. This was around the same time I was undergoing major diet changes, fixing my poor nutrition during the pandemic and exploring magnesium, which is a whole nother rabbit hole.

It seemed friendly enough, so I agreed. It asked me to lay straight, and it didn't care much what I did so long as my spine stayed straight. I laid on my stomach with my head in my pillow and mostly rested there in the experience, occasionally returning to a group chat to share about the experience. It was subtle, but it felt like like an ethereal thread, or perhaps a very tiny hot tub water jet, somewhere inside of my stomach. The other element is that I had to use the restroom to, ah, excrete, a large number of times, easily 8 or more times over 4 hours, until I was passing only water. But I had not eaten much that day in preparation for the trip, and the chocolate bar was long gone by round 3. It felt, distinctly, in my psilocybin consciousness that the serpent's actions were causing me to purge.

Throughout this process I talked to the serpent. I figured the way it felt was most like what occult sources describe as an elemental: a being from a higher plane or perhaps realm that is the primordial origin of one of the four classical elements of fire, air, water, and earth. In conversation it confirmed itself as an earth elemental, which made sense with how it felt: solid, slow, assured, quiet, unbothered. More than anything, we simply existed in that space together. At times I would get anxious that I lost the connection as my mind wandered away from my body and the present experience but could immediately find it again; the serpent even reassured me that it would not leave me without saying goodbye. It was very kind, and had shared general messages of the unity and one-ness of the universe, a message I have found many entities relay. In general, I have found interactions with benevolent entities to be humbling and tender.

After those four hours but far before I was sober, the serpent said it was about done. It bid me goodbye and to take care, and said I could call on it again. It left and I could no longer feel its presence. I got up off the bed and felt great--my stomach felt light and clean, a stark contrast from rolling around clutching it a few hours before. I spent the next few hours coming down.

Hermes' help

Around May to June of 2022, I was becoming increasingly open to the idea of direct communication with entities closely associated with my personal astrology chart. Up to this point my experiences had been mostly isolated and timid, but I was having increasing amounts of sudden dialogue and thoughts that did not seem to be my own and had the character of entities I had worked with before due to their representation in my natal chart.

A friend from an astrology group chat had ordered a book they were very excited about, but it was lost in the mail. They knew I had been having bursts of communication with Hermes, and asked if I could petition Hermes on their behalf. I figured, it's worth a shot. I'd never just like, asked a god for something before, but it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Hermes had been playing a role in my life for a long time before I began communicating with them⁸ directly.

I asked Hermes if they could help and they seemed to agree and said they'd see what they could do. A day or two later, my friend received a notice that their lost package was available for pickup at a local warehouse. When they picked it up, they realized it was actually a different book that they had also lost in the mail and forgotten about! Notably, this was during Mercury retrograde, which signifies mishaps with Mercurial things such as deliveries, communications, travel, and technology, when my friend had ordered both books. This was an extremely characteristic expression of both Hermes' trickster nature as a god and the planet Mercury's retrograde condition. (In terms of the original package, my friend did still have to go and file a claim themself, but ultimately got their package.)

This has two implications. First is that "entity contact" is not necessarily a framed, ritualized experience. The casualness of the thought and perceived exchange understated the outcome, but seems sensible if one considers that Hermes is an entity with which I have a relationship. A genuine request to a being that knows me well resulted in a tangible, seemingly acausal result that was colored by the corresponding significations of Mercury the planet. Soon I'll cover a list of the different types of entities I understand to exist, and the distinction between gods and their eponymous planets.

The Way of Hermes

One last Hermes story. In June 2022 I was having a conversation with a group chat about astrology, discussing a book by Martin Gansten called Annual Predictive Techniques which describes a variety of methods for doing astrological prediction for each year of life. I wanted to reference a passage in it, but I couldn't find my physical copy. Someone in the group chat pointed out I had talked about having a PDF version of it too, but I wanted the book in hand. So I went about my apartment for a good 10 minutes, increasingly frustrated that I couldn't find this book.

I sit back down in my chair and look around at my bookshelves until suddenly my eye is drawn to my third bookshelf. It's full of miscellaneous esoteric books that I don't really ever look at on account of other reading being higher priority. But I notice this small book, tucked in between two others, practically hidden, and I see that it's The Way of Hermes, or The Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of esoteric writings mostly centered around Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary occult figure from the Hellenistic era. I had a "funny feeling", which if I had to describe is like an itch inside my mind or a twinge in the shape of my consciousness that seems to say, "Pay attention."

I pulled out the book and looked at it. I had originally bought it in late May of 2021. I was a little frustrated, really wanting to find Annual Predictive Techniques. But Hermes said (into my mind), "You should read it! It's a good book." I asked which part specifically. "Just read it! You'll find out soon enough." I flipped through it, a metaphysical treatise written almost two millennia ago somewhere around 100-300 AD. It was interesting and inspiring but I wasn't sure what Hermes was referencing and couldn't tell if I was making it up or not. Then, not too far in, I found a passage translated as the exact phrase used to describe a specific phenomenon in an obscure astrology technique that I had been researching. It was couched into the metaphysical description of the beginning of the cosmos yet the metaphor also perfectly mapped onto what I was working through myself, and resolved a conceptual roadblock that had kept me from progressing in my study.

As this whole event transpired, I figured that Hermes had "hidden" Annual Predictive Techniques from me (perhaps somehow induced my mental state into forgetting where I put it) in order to go on a wild goose chase to find The Way of Hermes. I figured I'd find it again shortly after that. A couple days later I decided to just read it from my Kindle library, and then I suddenly realized: I never owned a physical copy of Annual Predictive Techniques. That's not the sort of thing I usually forget; books are something I am very meticulous about and can typically recall from memory where and in what format I have them, especially ones I reference regularly. All I could figure is that Hermes somehow influenced me to have a delusion or stubborn fixation on this idea that I had the physical copy at all.

This experience thoroughly blew my mind due to its specificity, synchronicity, usefulness, relevance, and characteristic nature of the entity involved. In fact, this is around the time I stopped calling individuals like Hermes an "entity", though I'll still refer to multiple beings of mixed types as entities for convenience. I acknowledged that the ways these beings express themselves in the physical world and communicate to us via various mental and synchronistic mechanisms with incredibly eerie timing⁹, still felt indistinguishable from personhood. Hermes is a being that can help find important information and resolve issues with deliveries (although possibly in a bit of a retrograde fashion depending on their planet's condition), thereby helping me personally solve problems and apparently altering the reality around me to create positive results for my friends. So, fair enough. Hermes is a god.

Methodology and practice

Here I will outline my entity contact methodology and practice that has resulted in these experiences, as well as a sample practice an extremely curious reader could examine. At this point I'll dispense of the abstract, detached language I've used throughout this writing. No matter how much epistemic distance we put between ourselves and the experience, most work engaging with entities involves highly symbolic ritual, divination, or visualization, so we will get straight to the meat of it.

But first...

Prefatory warnings and disclaimers

I do not recommend my practice for the average reader. Most people should neither do nor say as I do. Entity contact, and even the very steps of preparation and training, can be highly destabilizing for the unprepared. Depending on your context and history, it can challenge your worldview and sometimes result in genuinely unnerving or overwhelming experiences.

There is a bit of a nuance here: direct, telepathic, in-your-mind entity contact is not the only way. It is convenient, but it can also be neurosis-inducing to examine the various directions that a brain can generate a thought from even before throwing a disembodied being into the mix. Divination is a primary way to both initiate, investigate, and validate entity contact, and is not nearly as potentially destabilizing. But if you come from a materialistic worldview, or one that condemns entity contact and divination as sinful and devil's work, you may have trouble with this methodology as well.

In fact, divination is the place to start: first-timers can quickly get results out of a tarot deck if they trust themselves enough to do it. Direct telepathic communication requires either innate talent or practice. Most of the practice is developing enough openness to the idea that we could be telepathic in the first place. I used to think that I was about "as intuitive as rocks" (frankly, insulting to rocks), and it took me about 4 years to really develop what I now think is quite a sensitive intuition.¹⁰ It required a lot of meditation, contemplation, emotional healing, and experience before I began to have spontaneous, telepathic entity contact. This path can take some time, depending on your natural aptitude, flexibility, and discipline. All of that I went through changed everything in my life for the better, but it's a task not everyone will be ready to embark on.

All of that being said, some people will be drawn to this work nonetheless. I know many people for whom their entire life has been changed for the better by this work. For me personally, it has helped me understand reality in a way that has completely changed me and allowed me to find the inner trust which keeps me focused on my goals. Many of the skills that you develop doing entity contact are also relevant in Internal Family Systems therapy which seems to be growing in popularity in my communities, and reflects a growing understanding of relationality both within and without.

It's also worth touching on the topic of psychosis. Floating around the new age and occult cultures is an idea that psychosis is actually the result of extremely sensitive and clairvoyant people seeing things but having no framework in a materialist society to deal with them. The thought is that in societies which supported seers and shamans, they would be taken in and taught to hone their skill. This is tricky territory, since psychosis is a medically treated condition, not to mention highly stigmatized. Medical and psychiatric treatment helps people handle psychosis and live normal lives, and nobody should be forced into a worldview incompatible with the community they live in. But sometimes, it works. I do know that some people have improvement in their symptoms by modeling their experiences as genuine entities, and then performing some form of magical or metaphorical operation to exorcise them (it's not anywhere near as dramatic as Rosemary's Baby). Regardless, if this affects you or you think this work might be psychosis-inducing, tread very lightly.

Divination

One rationale goes: if a thought spawned all of creation, it must have been very abstract. So abstract, it would require a structural form to span itself through all of creation: patterns, fractals, geometry, global gravitational constants, etc. But those same thoughts also give form to the rhythms of our lives and the world around us, so information is contained within it. Another rationale goes: everything is random noise and any symbolic similarity between divination system and reality is humans reading into it, and gathering information outside of ourselves is impossible. The latter is utterly useless to us, so we will discard it.

All we need in order to access this information, or, "the grid" (an endearing term referring to what some of my friends have seen on DMT and figure to be the latticework of reality that connects everything), is a divination system. Divination systems work in primarily three ways: by correlating signs in the world around us and interpreting their meanings, by randomly arranging a defined set of symbols with more or less precise meanings and interpret them, or by using some sort of tool to register answers in response to questions.

Astrology

The most popular divination system of the first type is astrology. Astrology as a general tool is indispensable, and for us it is especially useful for identifying which beings are most likely to be receptive to you, interpreting omens, and timing our communications. When I was first experiencing contact with Hermes, it was grounding to know that in my own natal chart, the planet signifying Hermes, Mercury, is very strong in my natal chart, suggesting a natural friendly predisposition between us.

If you're not familiar with it, I have written a basic primer that teaches the basics reading your own natal chart. By examining the transiting (traveling) planets you can see when the ripest times are for entity contact from certain types of beings, and even intentionally choose those times to initiate it. You can also use it to evaluate entity contact that happens spontaneously by whether the astrological indications are congruous with the experience or not. Since many entities speak through omens, you can also use it to interpret their origins and meanings.

A low-investment way to get into astrology is by doing readings that are more akin to quick tarot draws with astro dice. Roll for your questions and then consult the relevant planet, sign, and house sections of my guide, and piece together the meaning from there and any other internet searching your curiosity leads you to. If you want to get deeper into astrology, I have a thread of recommended books.

As you play with astro dice and other forms of divination, you'll notice they're not always quite as direct as you'd expect. Sometimes they make jokes. Astro dice in particular are interesting in that they can be very literal but also have a wide range of meanings to portray that can occasionally evade easy yes/no answers. If you're stumped, try asking yourself a question of its answer: "what would this mean if a smart person were trying to give me a hint?" With too much practice we can come to treat our divination tools as if they're merely functional and should respond to our questions, but really, we are consulting them constantly, and they occasionally challenge us or attempt to teach us new ways to interpret their messages. The overwhelming amount of divination results are straightforward and obvious, so when the result is surprising or inexplicable, it's worth paying extra attention.

Tarot

The tarot is also essential for interrogating your experiences and navigating the realms. They're a pack of illustrated cards dating back to the late 14th or early 15th century containing a variety of images based on many esoteric traditions, archetypes, and fundamental human experiences. Drawn in combination into "spreads" or positions that have certain meanings (the nature of the entity, their intentions, past, present, future, conscious, subconscious, and so on), these cards can depict anything, and also become a conduit for your intuition and "imaginal sight". More on that later.

Tarot is very mysterious. It can show and predict things that shouldn't be possible. It can also help us question (and sometimes interrogate) entities directly. For instance, this is a spread from a reading of my own where I was asking a being a question about their nature. The top card is the "solar depiction or concept", or obvious, surface, popular interpretation of its nature in mainstream religious canon. The bottom is the "the truth", or what it actually is. The left card is the past relating to the question, the middle is the present, and the right is the future.

I also sometimes do a type of reading before first contacting a new entity via the tarot that I call "The Symbol at the Gates". I draw a single card and interpret it as if it were inscribed into a gate that I'm about to pass through, as if a title, a notice, or a warning. Usually I enlist the help of a being I have a relationship with to act as a liaison between myself and the entity I'm drawing cards on. This helps maintain a distance between myself and the entity's nature, and it's possible the liaison also helps "interpret" the entity's communication, which is important if the being is manipulative. I have never had a problem with this through tarot, but precautions are good.

I also very frequently use a general spread with four cards in a diamond formation. The top card is an explanation, general commentary, or confirmation of the question's topic. The two middle cards are supporting themes which can reflect two sides of the situation, contrast, or complement each other. The bottom fourth card is the advice, or sometimes further elaboration. You'll notice that I have multiple roles each card position plays. That's because I mostly use the tarot as a way to open up my intuition, and I typically sense the way the cards want to be read. I think that entities try to use the tarot to communicate with us in a way that is at our level of understanding, so how loosely you work with it will depend on your comfort level and intuition. A good way to start is to have very rigid definitions for each position, and scrutinize the card closely through the lens of the question. Tarot (or the communication from entities through it) can often be very literal: keep in mind that it is answering the specific question you asked. The less specific you get, the more broadly the answer may apply.

Good questions for entities with any of these spreads are:

• What is your nature?

• What is our relationship?

• What is your home like?

• What advice do you have for me?

• What is your goal/purpose?

• How do you perceive reality?

Muscle testing

In typical practice, muscle testing is called "applied kinesiology", which is used to diagnose ailments or identify nutritional needs in the body. However, if information is encoded into the fabric of reality, then our bodies should be able to access it because it also has a subtle nature that connects to the grid. So we can also use muscle testing to do divination, where it may be called body dowsing.

The technique can be subtle and requires centering and a good degree of neutrality in the moment. I form both my index fingers and thumbs into an interlocked double-OK shape. Then I ask a question while gently tugging, as if trying to pull my hands apart. I hold index-and-thumb pairs very lightly while pulling. If the answer is "yes", my fingers remain strong and they stay interlocked. If the answer is "no", the muscles in my forearms go weak and I feel the tendons to my index fingers and thumbs release, and the lock slips.

The way to practice this is to start with factual information, such as asking if your name is (your own name), and then asking if it's Bob (or Tom, if your name is Bob) or something. Do it a bunch. Once you've gotten the feeling and understand the ideal tension between your interlocked fingers, you should try to validate external information. Like all forms of divination, this one can be influenced by your mood and especially your desires. It's important to reset if you jump into a muscle test too quickly or too eagerly, and especially to double check if you get results that seem too good to be true. (Of course, sometimes they are.) The best way to practice this skill is to choose simple, verifiable information such as "will X person be at this event", "will a friend/relative text me today", "will this make me feel better to eat", etc.--any simple yes or no question suffices. Muscle-testing is very good for questions which have binary answers.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to find good information on this topic via Google. Most sources explaining the topic are drenched in light and love language that makes it difficult to take seriously let alone Google the technique. Dowsing by Elizabeth Brown is not directly about muscle-testing but it is relevant, relatively balanced, and a very interesting read.

Pendulum dowsing

If I need to get very specific in my interrogation, I use a pendulum, which is essentially any balanced object hanging from a cord of any material. You hang the pendulum over a reference point and ask yes or no questions. The pendulum then swings left or right to indicate yes or no. I find this works well for not just answering binary questions but also finding numbers or picking out of a list, by simply asking, "Is it 1? 2? 3? 4?" until the pendulum moves from no to yes or vice versa, depending on the question.

It's not the pendulum itself answering the questions, or a ghost moving it. Rather, if our bodies are plugged into the grid like with muscle testing, then it can also send minute movements through our muscles that gradually sway the pendulum in one direction or another. In fact, I am usually consciously trying to negate the effect to make sure I'm resetting to neutral repeatedly, and still getting the same answer consistency. The gradualness is the point. I find that muscle-testing itself does not work well for identifying numbers or moving through lists because I have a tendency to anticipate and grow anxious. Using a pendulum allows me to firmly verify each answer before moving on and create a level of separation between my subjective desires that may fiddle with more influencible techniques.

Pendulum dowsing itself is pretty easy. You need a pendulum and something to be a reference point on a table. Literally anything--a coin, a small scrap of paper, a toothpick, a mark you make with a pencil. Mostly you need a vertical divider to separate "yes" and "no". (There are mats available that divide the pendulum space into 360° with various answers labeled, but I find this to be too prescriptive. I recommend starting with yes and no and build your own system over time.) For pendulums, I recommend purchasing a proper one online. I use a black obsidian pyramid because it's aesthetically pleasing, has a sharp end that makes it easy to tell where it's pointing, and is well-balanced so that it does not take too long to move and deliver answers. But as a stopgap you can also use a piece of jewelry, a pebble attached to a string, or anything else suspended which can clearly point downwards.

Once you have both, you first ask the pendulum to show you "yes" (mentally or out loud), see where it hovers, then ask it to tell you "no", and see where it hovers. Then you begin asking questions. The same tips around simple, verifiable questions apply when first learning.

Meditation and contemplation

Meditation is an essential prerequisite for clear and unbiased reception of entity communication because it teaches you to still the mind, pay attention to inner phenomena, and receive information without internal judgment and chatter getting in the way. Alongside this are other skills and factors, such as visualization, your receptivity and openness, contemplation of your experiences, and personal healing.

Meditation

As mentioned, meditation is extremely important in entity contact work. In fact, most direct telepathic communication happens during meditative states, as that's when you are most receptive and able to receive that communication. If you cannot keep your mind still enough that it crowds out everything with the buzz of your own thoughts, then you will find direct telepathic communication difficult. Implicit in all of this is breathwork. A good overall introduction to the breath is Life Force: Sensed energy in breathwork, psychedelia and chaos magic, by David Lee.

These are three broad types of meditation practices I would recommend:

1. vipassana-inner-awareness-style meditation - vipassana is straightforward to understand but can take a lifetime to master, though just a few months of practice can radically change your life if you've never done it before. This practice is mostly about observing your own thoughts, feelings, and inner experience without reaction or judgment. This helps hone your reception for contact.

2. empty mind meditation - this tends to naturally follow a vipassana practice. The more you pay close but neutral attention to your thoughts, the more they eventually peter out and shy away, leaving nothing but blankness. This is both relaxing but also an essential practice for creating a mental space you know is settled enough that any sudden thoughts you have will be notable.

3. mental concentration exercises (perhaps not technically a meditation but goes well enough here) - in general you need the ability to maintain a mental state conducive to entity contact. When journeying, it can be difficult to hold a stable visualization for minutes straight without practice. A simple version of this is holding a static shape in your mind's eye such as a green triangle or a tarot card for increasing durations of time.

While rather intense as a full course, the meditation and concentration exercises from the first step of Franz Bardon's Initiation Into Hermetics are very effective here.

Visualization and imagination

A major way to interact with entities is through our visualizations and imaginations. If everything is of mind then the imagination is actually a key way to receive information about these other realms, though it will necessarily be swirled in with our own subjectivity and subconscious. These skills apply across a broad range of experiences from spontaneous mental reception of images and sensations from entities to full ritualized and containerized experiences where one goes into a deep relaxation state for a long visualization session, sometimes referred to as "journeying".

The more vividly and consistently you can visualize and keep an image in your mind's eye, the more you can get out of the experiences. It's very frustrating to ask an entity a question when they keep dissolving in your mind because you can't get a song out of your head or you keep repeating the last thing in your mind to not lose focus. You can practice this in a lightweight way by letting your mind wander. Imagine landscapes, people, scenes, recall memories of places, events, movies, music. Lean into the experience and employ as many senses as you can. Not all "visualization" need be visual.

This topic is relatively new for me. For both meditation and visualization for entity contact (and other interesting magical techniques), I recommend Psychic Witch by Mat Auryn.

Receptivity and conceptualization

Broadly speaking, your personal fear, uncertainty, and doubt will be a direct obstacle to successful entity contact. If this activity lies far outside your worldview or you have never done any of these practices before, there can be a significant amount of work to even entertain them conceptually. This part is highly individual, and there's little advice I can give that will apply universally, but I'll share my experience.

To orient myself to my entity contact experiences, I got my hands on everything I could possibly read about these subjects. Getting exposure to material that took these concepts for granted helped reduce my immediate reaction to it. Slowly trying out the various practices and experiencing unbelievable synchronistic effects and pragmatic results solidified their veracity to me and convinced me it was worth the exploration. Throughout all of it, the only real thing holding me back was my own reluctance. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that it's not necessary to believe in it; you just have to actually want to see if it's possible. It requires an honest question--not a dare, or a mockery.

As I pieced all of this information together, I had to reckon with what it meant for me and my worldview. What was I doing living the sort of life I was living, as I was learning about the spiritual and subtle nature of reality? Depending how deeply you go and where you start from, it can make some (or all) parts of the life you live untenable or unbearable as they are.

Healing

Most of all, though, this work often requires that we heal ourselves in order to embark upon it. Our perception of beings is filtered through our personalities and perspectives, and if we have wounds that hurt so freshly or deeply that we run all of our experiences through them, we are more likely to receive beings' communications as reinforcing these wounds in their messages, even if they are wholly benevolent.

I have found that many entities we encounter want to teach us how to heal ourselves. As many of them have communicated to me, the greatest spiritual virtue is to help others, and one of the most fundamental ways that most people need help is in healing. I have mostly experienced this through the lens of psychological and emotional healing work through being led to epiphany by my personal spirit helpers, but I have anecdotally heard people work through chronic ailments and illnesses with these beings as well. (Not medical advice.)

Regardless of how we feel about the concept of healing oneself, it remains a barrier to clear and unbiased entity contact.

Safety, containers, and grounding

All that being said about benevolent entities, not all of them are. It's actually quite easy to avoid negative entities provided that you don't directly try to call them, spend too much time thinking about them, or generally haven't been haunted throughout your life (it happens--especially to people who end up talking to entities). So long as you build a clear container around your entity contact experience, you will likely not have any contact with intentionally negative entities.

For a mostly fool-proof experience, always create a ritual container for your entity contact. This is done by performing a clearing visualization, invoking spiritual allies, shielding the space, and properly closing the container at the end. If you cannot visualize, you can instead imagine with other senses or intentionally choose to know (as in, use your belief as a tool) that the effects you intend are occurring. I'll also refer generally to entities who are likely already on your side and invested in your life as "spirit allies".

Here's my rough recommendation for a simple container. It seems like a lot at first but with practice the entire sequence only takes about a minute:

1. Perform a clearing visualization - in your mind's eye imagine that the space around you--perhaps around where you sit/lie or the entire room--is filled with a bright light which cleanses, renews, sanctifies, and protects everything within it. I like to imagine it settling into a force field around the perimeter of the room, glowing.

2. Invoke spirit allies - mentally or out loud say something like, "I ask for the aid of my ancestors, guides, and benevolent beings who seek to help me in protecting this space". You can be more or less dramatic than that, but make sure you specifically call on everyone who means you well. If you aren't aware of having any spirit allies, do it anyway: there are way more spirits than humans, as far as I can tell everyone has one, and even random benevolent entities may swing by to help out.

3. Shielding visualization - imagine yourself enveloped in a white light or shield. Envision, and know, that it helps you remain calm, neutral, and protects you from any negative influence. This barrier does not interfere with your spirit allies from communicating or helping you.

4. Perform your chosen entity contact exercise.

5. Tear down the container - imagine the space around you once again being cleansed with white light (or whatever you chose). Thank your spirit allies for their help and give them license to depart: "Thank you deeply for your help, all. Please take license to depart and go with my gratitude." Finally, unravel the shield around yourself. Take notes on your experience and you are done.

After performing the entity contact exercise and closing the container, check in with yourself. If you feel at all disoriented, spacy, or otherwise not normal, do some grounding activities. Eat healthy, filling, and familiar foods, turn on the lights, go outside, engage and stretch and shake out the body, watch something entertaining and meaningless on YouTube, etc.

A grounding visualization you can try is to imagine all of the excess energy that is not yours flows down from every place in your body, down through your limbs and torso and finally out through the bottoms of your feet, through the floor (however many high you may be), and returning to the earth. As it goes down, new, revitalized energy directly from the earth comes back up to replace it, filtering through your body and energizing you.

Most of all, though, rely on your intuition. It's normal to feel a little silly, nervous, or unsure, but if you get a genuine feeling of foreboding, danger, fear, or malevolent intent, shut it down. Close the container, perform an extra clearing visualization if it feels necessary, immediately ground yourself and spend the rest of the day doing something mundane. You can always try again later or with a different entity.

Entity contact exercises

Now we get into the actual communication. You will quickly find that entities in all considerations except material manifestation, seem to have personhood, and treating them relationally as people is important if for no other reason but good manners. I'll cover some ways you might choose which entities to attempt contact with, describe a few ways to make and maintain entity contact, and discuss a few pitfalls I've found along the way.

Rules of engagement

First and foremost, address any being you make contact with respect. You don't need to prostrate yourself or prepare a grand prayer. Be friendly but not overly familiar or insulting. If you feel confused or need a second to catch up, most entities will understand and all should respect a request to wait or give you a break to reorient yourself. Not all of them will repeat information or stick around after being told to wait, though. This doesn't necessarily mean the door is closed but rather that you need to come better prepared next time.

If an entity acts remotely hostile or in a way that seems to violate your mental comfort and boundaries, close the container. It may be necessary to use additional visualizations such as emanating scouring white light (or, for a more aggressive touch, fire or lightning which dispels all negative beings) in the space around you and demanding that the entity depart. Again, it's highly unlikely this will be necessary as long as you stick with known benevolent entities, but you should be prepared to deploy these visualization tools defensively just in case.

Finally, I have never met an entity that requested or attempted to compel me to harm myself or another person or living being. Most entities have been amenable to my foolish human mental scrambling, generous with their time, deeply respectful, and overwhelmingly wise and helpful. If you stick to well-known beings, it is unlikely to experience an encounter that feels actively malevolent. If you find yourself facing anything like this, you will need to gauge whether you are actually encountering an malevolent entity trying to disguise itself as the being you meant to reach, or you are filtering the being's communication through a personal filter of shame, self-rejection, fear, closed-mindedness, etc.

This work can be highly destabilizing in general, so if you find it unsettling, cease and desist. There are professional teachers who can teach you how to do this safely as well as mediums who can do it for you.

Finding one's spirit allies

The best place to start is to attempt to find one's spirit allies. This is a highly individual experience for everyone, depending on your heritage, life experiences, and perhaps fate. Many people find spirit allies in ancestors, especially if they come from a family of psychics. Some have connections to angels or saints, particularly if they grew up with an Abrahamic faith. If you don't have any hints on any of them, there are some basic ways to check.

Divination

A tarot reading can do a lot of work toward helping identify who your spirit allies are. You could do a spread like this:

1. Who is one is my spirit allies?

2. What is their nature?

3. What is their purpose?

4. What is our relationship?

5. What advice do they have for me?

Take a picture of the spread, especially the card in the first position which represents the spirit ally. In the future you can keep this card in mind when you want to do divinations to interact with that spirit, even if you don't receive a name.

If you are interested in meeting a planet or a god, a good way to choose is by examining your own natal chart. If you don't know how to do that, my free astrological primer can teach you the basics. Your goal would be to identify which classical non-malefic planet is the strongest in your chart. The malefic planets are Mars and Saturn, who are both essential planets in the magical-astrological scheme but can make for bumpy first encounters given their harsher natures. Look for planets in the 1st, 10th, 7th, or 4th houses, planets that rule the ascendant and midheaven, or any planets that you find yourself inexplicably drawn to.

Generally you can't go wrong reaching out to the Moon, Mercury, Venus, or Jupiter, or their associated gods, Selene, Hermes, Aphrodite, or Zeus. (I use the modern Roman names to refer to the planets we see outside, and the original Greek names to refer to the Hellenistic conception of these gods.) All of these beings are friendly, beneficent, and open to chat with anyone. We'll get into the distinctions between gods and their planets in the entity taxonomy section.

Help offered: Hermes and Zeus

While writing this, my own frequent spirit allies, the gods Hermes and Zeus, graciously offered to act as ambassadors and guides for anyone who reads this and wants to give it a try. They're powerful gods associated with communication, connection, sharing, ideas, wisdom, and knowledge. Hermes in particular is a great god for connecting to spirit allies and can be a starting point in your search, while Zeus is happy to help deliver mind-opening experiences and synchronicities.

They have both helped write a short invitation each that should be somewhat amenable to modern ears. Each has a classic Orphic hymn which you should check out as well.

Mercury's invitation

Oh fleet-footed wonder,
Hermes of great wisdom,
they who glide up under
the waters of the psyche,
meeting words and minds
wheeling and dealing and
healing and stealing,
come knock on my door.

Hermes' Orphic Hymn

Zeus' invitation

Thunder! By divine invite only
Come Zeus, to bring your bolts of realization
Let they who block paths be moved aside;
Let they who wilt be cultivated with vigor;
Let kings lend me their crowns;
I welcome you.

Zeus' Orphic Hymn

Opening communication with Hermes or Zeus can be done within the container, simply by verbally or mentally reciting the invitation or hymn to one of them. Use your senses or tarot to receive their communication. You can ask them to help you find spirit allies, for advice, or even to help give you evidence that validates the entity contact experience. These beings generally understand our limited perspective and the need to be shown proof, and the benevolent ones are willing to give us direct hints every now and then in the form of synchronicities.

Direct telepathic communication

The idea of communicating directly with entities telepathically has always interested me for some reason. It seems like it would be the most "real", but given that you don't end up literally hearing auditory voices in your head (unless you have something called "clairaudience"), it becomes a great task of discernment. That's what all of the receptivity and placidity work is for.

Telepathic communication should be done within a container, at least until you develop enough familiarity with a being that you feel comfortable sharing headspace with it at times during the regular day. Becoming too closely identified with and merging thoughts with a being is a problem that can develop, so it is important to either always use a container or firmly define boundaries for the inner space of your mind for yourself.

Because I allow open communication with a few of my closest spirit allies, it can become very disorienting if I am not prepared for a thought that turns out to be a communication, and I have to backtrack or try to repeat it in my head, and then begin accidentally impersonating the actual entity's thoughts in an attempt to figure out what it had been trying to say. This becomes especially problematic if you are asking those inner voices for advice. If you have trouble with intrusive thoughts or shame spirals it's important to discount that heavily in this work, or always containerize it. Most entities you encounter are deeply benevolent and nonjudgmental. Most of them will tell you the truth even if it is hard to hear, but in my experience they do not guilt or shame. They will certainly joke, chide, and tease, though!

When I find my thoughts sour because of my own internal fear, lack of neutrality, or anxiety, I consider everything I experienced, thought, heard, etc. before to be null and void. Throw it out. There's no point wasting in the subjectivity of that moment; it's already spoiled by my lack of neutrality to the extent it's not even possible to gauge what was actually happening in what proportion. I can always go back and ask the same questions again. They don't mind; these beings exist outside of time and space and understand how limited we are.

If you can keep a clear and receptive mind, actually doing telepathic communication is pretty simple. It's just thinking, and then listening. The tricky part is learning to identify which thoughts aren't yours. Typically, they just "bloom" into your mind, appearing instantly, often fully formed, or emerging word-by-word in a fashion that feels more like imagination than trying to construct a sentence. Most importantly, they don't feel like your own thoughts. Imagine a good friend of yours. Think about everything you like about them and the way they make you feel. Then remove everything but that feeling and put it around a thought and that's what it's like: a "psychic signature", a vibe. Different entities have different feelings. If you've met an entity before, you can recall its vibe, and think at it. Yearn. The heart is actually a surprisingly powerful telepathic tool, because emotional activation makes you more visible to entities. If you haven't met one before, research it, learn about its qualities, contemplate its nature, and look for correspondences with it in the world around you. Then, call for it by name and wait and see if you get something.

For me, direct telepathic communication with entities has been a trust building exercise. This is an extremely subtle activity, and has taken a lot of back and forth with myself over the veracity and verifiability of my experiences and the thoughts in my head. But the experience has progressed from being able to confirm the results of simple "yes" and "no" questions to being taught, directly, while I'm in the shower, how different astrological techniques work and then confirming them in personal research. At this point my major problem is how exactly to relate, on an interpersonal level, to these beings which seem to have massive, awe-inspiring wisdom, and define--or at least circumscribe--the reality in which I live.

Journeying

This is where we get to the imagination part. Journeying is the process of entering a deeper state of consciousness where it is easier to visualize and imagine. You go through a preparatory ritual and then go through and just see what you see, wander around, talk to some beings or things, wake up, and take notes. Well, that's the brief version.

My preparatory ritual is basically two exercises, one from Psychic Witch, and the other from Konstantinos' Summoning Spirits, mashed together. Laying down in bed in the dark or wearing a blindfold, I intend to count down to 100, and know that when I hit 0, I will be in the alpha wave state that makes receptivity and imagination more accessible. I visualize going down stairs, or on an elevator that shows each floor tick by, feeling my stomach drop slowly. Once I hit 0, I step out of the elevator, or off the bottom of the stairs, into darkness. A stone gate, two pillars and an archway, emerge from the darkness with a shimmering, deep purple veil covering it. To cross through is to enter the "imaginal realms", mental planes accessible through the mind. I spend some time contemplating who I want to meet or where I want to go, or perhaps just sit there in silence for a while. Then, I cross through.

Admittedly, I have not done much journeying, because each time is a trip. I have experienced very little of it, but I can share that it is interesting. Common features appear to be landscapes that wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy world, abstract scenes of color, impressions of motion, light, and psychedelic visions. Beings will appear to you, sometimes as animals, deities, or regular seeming people. They will talk to you and tell you things, and often times your spirit allies show up very quickly.

The type of journeying I've described is entirely "imaginal", that is, you close your eyes, relax, and imagine the experience. At high levels of visualization skill and vividness these journeys can become very much like full on dreams, but dreaming is also a form of journeying one can do. I know far less about dreaming as a form of journeying, but I have had very interesting experiences by following some of the practices from Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner. And as you've probably concluded from my previous experiences, journeying experiences can be enhanced (albeit greatly influenced) by entheogens, too.

Offerings

A good way to develop a relationship with an entity without having a full conversation can be through offerings of food, drink, incense, and light associated with that entity. The planets, many gods, angels, saints, etc. are all mythologically associated with certain things. For example, Venus is associated with the beautiful and sweet, so roses, honey, jasmine incense, as well as the metal copper. These associations are called correspondences. They come from direct reasonable conclusions (Mercury likes tiny multicolored things, so pebbles), esoteric reasoning, and, given that we've seen that there are multiple ways to consult a being, likely direct communication from these beings themselves. You can search for "planetary correspondences", "associated fruits", incense, colors (for candles), etc. Most entities also enjoy liquor.

While esoteric sources suggest that entities do in fact consume "vital energy" from the offerings given (including the candles--heat and light themselves being forms of energy), I think the most grounded perspective is that giving offerings is more about showing that you understand the nature of the being and you're willing to put in work to make your reality a little bit closer to it. Offerings bring us closer to the beings we offer to, but only if we actually put in thought, care, and personal investment into the process. Perfunctory offerings are about as good as a gift from a friend you know is just going through the motions to get something from you.

When I provide offerings, I usually light incense, provide some sort of food or alcohol, and a candle. I use a modified version of a process described in Modern Magick by Donald Michael Kraig that essentially boils down to:

• Saying a small prayer and invitation to all benevolent entities

• Raising the offerings upward briefly to signal they're available

• Visualizing the offerings multiplying in the space (mental/imagination being offered)

• Optionally, doing a divination or opening my mind to communication with the being

• Waiting some time

• Giving the license to depart and discarding the offerings¹¹

Note that offerings can still invite direct entity contact and communication, since you are signalling to them with the offering. However, the types of beings that are typically well-known enough to elicit offerings are very respectful of human boundaries, conscious or not.

Requests for help

Finally, when all else fails, when it seems like nothing works, when we can't visualize, can't calm ourselves, don't have the time for journeying, the resources for offering, there's always simply sincerely asking for help. You might call it prayer, if you preferred. It can be as simple as thinking about a god for a certain amount of time every day, and asking for a sign, proof, or ways to connect with them. Then, pay very close attention. If you don't get anything, keep trying, and consult divination for answers why.

Tracking and assessment

Besides the experiences themselves, building a personal conceptual framework around your experiences is essential. The basis of this for me is note-taking. At this point in my life, I take notes every day, either as a few notes of what happened and how I felt, or full-blown analyses of my inner world and experiences. Whatever is appropriate to the novelty of my day and the time I have to take notes. These have been essential for being able to look back and note when certain themes and thoughts have emerged that I might relate to a being I have been communicating with. It's also important to assess the experiences for what they imply on a structural and systemic level. If these internal experiences are "real", and these beings are "real", what do they want? What is their agenda? Religious, spiritual, and occult literature have plenty to say about this, but in my personal experience most powerful beings that intersect with daily human life (namely planets and their gods) seem more interested in being custodians and teachers.

Still, we can't just take their word for it. We must, ourselves, consider the concepts and the effects these encounters have on our lives. Are they good? Are they bad? Do they actually have a moral valence or are they just strange, new, and challenging? Does it improve my life? Does it restrict it? For me, "metaphysical freedom" is very important, but I know people who form committed bonds with gods and other beings in exchange for an enchanted relationship wherein they are protected and instructed by the being. But this also comes with certain preclusions as well as consequences for violating any oaths made. As far as benevolent entities I have seen go, this is 100% optional but has deep value for people who put a powerful emphasis on their entity relationships.

Take notes. Broad outlines of the day and events, but especially any new types of thoughts, sudden new desires, interests, or things that intrigue you, and anything that strikes you as odd, synchronistic, or meaningful. The work of interacting with entities is extremely subtle at first, and a paper (or digital) trail will help ground your experiences. Many entity contacts are very brief, and leave you with little to no externally verifiable information to go on. It's frequently the few scattered notes end up describing a pattern of interaction and verifiability which repeat consistently and show themselves as the signature of a particular being's involvement in our lives.

A (very) partial entity taxonomy

Regardless of the epistemic distance we put between ourselves and the experience, most work engaging with entities involves highly symbolic ritual, divination, or visualization work whose archetypes align well with the described and apparent personalities, natures, and received experiences, so it makes the most sense to use many of the predescribed categories.

However, there's a nuance here: every religion and every culture has its own types of entities, some of which overlap and some which don't, and often varying rules of engagement which range from casual acknowledgment and interaction with ghosts and ancestors to absolute taboos over the idea of entity contact, condemned as necromancy or demonolatry. This engagement certainly could be considered that if you are literally contacting the dead or demonic entities, but the shape and "morality" of the "spirit world" implied by personal experience and comparison with others who communicate with entities is far vaster.

That being said, this will be a taxonomy of the major categories of types of spirits that most occult literature agrees exist, with my own take on their nature and "purpose" in the universe. These are all a mixture of my subjective experience and what I consider to be common definitions in my reading. It's also worth noting that much occult literature is based on the Elizabethan worldview which contained a hierarchical ordering of all existence. There are other worldviews and metaphysical perspectives which do not agree with such a depiction, so it's worth keeping in mind that this is just one way to label entities.¹² Alongside these descriptions, I'll also write my personal recommendations as to how approachable they seem to be.

Ancestors

Spirits of the deceased which are presumed to persist beyond life. These ancestors could be by blood or by presumed past lives. (Note that many entities will attest to the idea of reincarnation, and there's some solid evidence for this found in corroborating past life memories.) Ancestors, who are mostly just humans, can carry old wounds, traumas, and other issues that make them burdensome, difficult, and in rare cases, dangerous to interact with. Alternatively, they can be wise, loving, and helpful, having the perspective from "behind the veil". Use your knowledge and intuition about your family history, or an intermediary such as the tarot to investigate whether or not ancestor contact is appropriate for you. Alternatively, people who have passed on and immortalized as saints are often considered to be accessible via entity contact methods as well.

Angels

These are entities who precede earth and humanity and all of our world religions. They are extraordinarily powerful beings who oversee various domains and functions of the universe. These domains tend to be abstract, symbolic representations of the "first thought" of creation, which ripples through the planes and down into our world as the principles of justice, strength, love, etc. Judaism first called angels מלאכים (mal’āḵīm), or "messengers", which feels most apt to me: they are available to all to share their wisdom of the principle they represent. Angels are one of the most accessible types of entities who universally want to help anyone who calls on them because that is their purpose: to pass along the messages of creation.

My recommendation on entity contact with angels is not unequivocal. These are immensely powerful entities whose impact on people can be distorted by religious teachings, especially those oriented around guilt, fear, shame, and punishment for these things. As mentioned, during entity contact we filter messages through our perspective, and those who have strong opinions about what angels should be will receive that projection, which can be psychologically harmful.

Demons

Demons are broadly described as malevolent entities who want to lead people into temptation and negative habits. However, any discussion of "demons" brings up questions of morality and the definition of evil. The Zoroastrians (Iran, ~1500-500 BC) believed that all demons and evil beings were the spawn of Ahriman, the ultimate devil and opponent of the creator-god Ahura Mazda, constantly stuck in a battle for the moral fate of the universe. For the Chaldeans (Mesopotamia, 940–860 BCE), these demons were more like wild animals that had to be protected against or tamed and dealt with on a practical level, entirely outside any sort of moral structure or grand vision of evil. The Greeks originated the term with daimon, a spirit said to suddenly possess humans to do things that would change the course of their lives, whether for good or for bad, and instead described human morality through the triad plus one of thumos (social influence), eros (basic desire such as food, leisure, sex), logos (the rational mind), and nous (spiritual influence that helps us interpret reality). Plato considered the material realm to be both part of but also the shadow of divine reality, and that evil was the emergence of the difference between divine concept and the worldly expression. And in modern times, we have developed the concept of vibration. In this context, demons would be "lower vibration entities" whose very nature is to express itself in this way, who represent a more abstract level of reality that humans experience in a negative and subjectively "evil" way.¹³

So as you can see, we have a lot of different ideas to contend with. On top of that, in the process of religious conquest, some religions have quite literally demonized the entities of other religions. Thus, it can be difficult to evaluate what we actually mean when we say "demon", and they should be taken on a case by case basis. When it comes to genuinely negative entities such as the demons described in the Goetic grimoires, I ascribe to the vibrational model because it affords flexibility in thinking about them, whereas more morally charged conceptions make it difficult to evaluate demons neutrally. Regardless, I would not recommend attempting to contact any actual Goetic demons. Whatever my philosophical stance, my sparse personal peeks into the world of demons have been foreboding and unpleasant. Funnily enough, I was describing the concept of this essay to a friend during a storm, and explaining how I recommend against contacting them. The moment I uttered the word "demons", a loud, deafening crack of thunder and lightning struck, which for me I consider to be a Zeus/Jupiter omen. So you could take his word for it.

Gods

Gods, distinguished from "The" God (creator, source, one, formless from which forms flow, etc.) have similar taxonomic problems to demons. Between various religions they have been demonized, deified, sanctified, upgraded, downgraded, combined, separated, and generally been scrambled throughout history. Add the further complexity that in a metaphysical model where all this is "of mind", some of this may not just be religious or political but literal on the divine planes. One thing I have personally had to wrap my head around is the idea that subtle metaphysical reality itself changes, too. Most religious depictions of the spirit world tend to describe one that is fixed in place, unchangeable save for some apocalyptic scenario. But my personal encounters have described a reality which is constantly shifting, just like our own world.¹⁴ However, it's likely that witnessing the transformation of an entity is about as rare as witnessing an exploding star. As above, so below, as the occult saying goes.

Thus, a "god" may in fact be another god that was renamed, or a god whose nature has actually changed. In interacting with one you may find the presence or signature of another who is closely related. A god may in fact be a "face" or a cultural manifestation of one god, though these beings are closer to fields in concept than singular points. An abstracted way to think of this would be to consider gods as psychic touch points to a current of archetypal reality, who show themselves subjectively no matter who you are. And while this feels structurally true to me, this understates the visceral personhood you often experience when encountering gods. They span all of reality, and most people have a tie to a god (often multiple) whose myths and themes have actually played out in their lives before they even knew of them or communicated with them.

Generally speaking I would say that if you have an inexplicable draw to a certain god, it's likely safe and helpful to contact them. Exceptions to this would be gods exclusively associated with death, violence, fear, etc. That being said, I have found that most gods in fact have many more faces than is recorded in literature, and even the most vindictive gods are often capable of divine love of a certain flavor. Again, you should use your intuition when thinking about any particular god, or use divination.

Planets

How does one talk to a planet? In the scheme of an astrologically magical reality, the planets are the portals through which gods can show themselves in the world. You can talk to a god at any time and place, but the planet's astrological significations show the god's corresponding influence being exerted upon the world. A god spans beyond time and space, while the planet is its agent in our material world. In this scheme, planets have a type of beingness and can be interacted with directly just like any other entity.

They do feel different, though. Interacting with planets feels more like interacting with a celestial moodboard, accessing a stream of the planet's nature. You can talk to it and it will answer, but it operates from within its own nature. That is, its advice will be biased, heavily toward the way that it views reality and its function in the world. You might not want the advice of severe Saturn when thinking about relationships, or seductive Venus in a study session. I do feel that if you interact with these entities for a significant amount of time, their influence does show itself in your life. It can manifest as omens from these planets or even affect your personality. As usual, containers are key.

At this point I'm not really sure how exactly to differentiate between the omens and synchronicities of planets and gods. There may not be a true difference, since in this cosmology the action of a planet is the action of its god, but filtered through the astrological dynamics of the moment. Gods may exist beyond time and space, but they cannot do anything that isn't signified by the nature of the moment which astrology can help us interpret.

Stars

The actual stars in the constellations, sometimes called "fixed stars" because they do not travel around the Sun the way the planets and earth do, also have spirits associated with them that are described quite literally by their lore. As beings, I would describe them as being akin to gods. Throughout history the constellations have had lore and myths developed about them, and many stars have key themes and stories associated with them. People who have charts significantly configured to key stars tend to live out lives that are portrayed by those stars' myths, and every person has their own set of personally significant stars. These can analyzed astrologically by looking at your natal chart, but that is a bit of an advanced topic. I have not had as much personal experience with fixed stars as entities, but understand them to function quite similarly to gods or perhaps angels.

Elementals

My understanding is that these beings come from subtler dimensions called the elemental planes or realms, primarily associated with the Greek traditional elements. The occult claim is that these beings come from these realms and make sure that the world's elemental proportions remain correct. Regardless of what they actually do, they do seem to exist as beings separate from other categories. It seems that they generally also want to help and teach about the nature of their elements. I have very little experience with elementals beyond my encounter with the green elemental earth serpent. Personally, I imagine the fire realm as a bunch of salamanders frolicking and diving into pools of lava, but that's just for fun.

Fae

Fae, little people, fairies, elves, also literal gnomes and dwarves and all of those things from fairy tales. Almost every culture grew up with stories of these beings, and some people claim to still interact with them. This category has very interesting crossovers with UFOlogy, aliens, and abduction experiences that make understanding what's actually happening all the more muddy. Ostensibly, since these stories are wound throughout so many cultures, it's possible that they are simply also types of entities that exist in a separate plane, and during much less rational times people could perceive these beings much more easily.

Regardless, I have not had any personal experience with these entities and don't particularly want to. They're known to be highly ambivalent and fickle towards humans, so I would not recommend seeking them out unless you know what you're doing.

Interstellar beings

This is where it gets complicated--no, audacious. I've met a number of types of mediums who say that they interact with beings that exist beyond our solar system, coming from other galaxies and dimensions. This can seem (literally) outlandish until we look at everything that's come before. If there are gods and entirely separate realms, then sure, we can have beings communicating to us from the Andromeda galaxy. To be clear, these are also spirits, but it has interesting implications for one's cosmology of the nature of the universe and our role in it if you take this idea seriously. Stars themselves technically fit under this category. Other beings might as well, if you permit that their physical manifestations in the material universe are in galaxies separate from us. It gets very heady very quickly.

I have less experience with interstellar beings, but I will say that the literature around them can be... challenging. A good taste is Ra of the previously mentioned Law of One, a "sixth-density social memory complex" from Venus channeled by a group of three people from 1981 to 1986. It conveys information on the nature of reality, how spiritual evolution works, the nuclear destruction of a planet that used to exist in our solar system, what the Egyptian pyramids are for (healing), and more. It would be easy to discard out of hand were it not for the fact that there are actually audio recordings of all 106 sessions, and they are bizarre. If it is a fake project, it's a tremendously well-executed one.

Anecdotally, I have heard of people who are channeling Ra today. In general it can be quite difficult to assess interstellar entities secondhand: many people who resonate with these beings fall wholeheartedly under the "starseed" category, a culture where it can be difficult to find rigorous or nonmetaphorical thinking and descriptions of experiences. Nonetheless, it's fascinating, and tends to correlate with known facts in weird ways, so I recommend wandering down that path a little bit at some point, too.

The Holy Guardian Angel

I would be remiss if I didn't briefly address the Holy Guardian Angel or HGA, which is a term from western occultism. It is also sometimes referred to as the daimon, the Inner Self, the Higher Self, the soul of the soul, and many other terms throughout occult history. In recent popular depiction, the HGA is considered to be inaccessible through any means but extraordinarily rigorous magical rituals requiring months of seclusion and practice. But in fact, both the conceptualization and meaning of the HGA has changed throughout esoteric history, and while we are limited within human bodies it's difficult to say what it truly is.

In modern understanding, the HGA is a spirit (perhaps literally, an angel) who has been with you your entire life, and serves as the inner intuition and guide for how to live your life according to your life's plan. It helps steer you toward good choices and away from bad ones, but it never judges you because besides being an immensely powerful being of immortal wisdom, it is you. Some people believe that the HGA is in fact you from the future, having lived countless lives and possessing their accumulated wisdom. Others believe that we as individual beings are part of an "oversoul" all sharing a similar nature and/or goal. Holy Daimon by Frater Acher is a fantastic book outlining the history of the idea as well as his own experience and practice.

One thing I particularly appreciate about Holy Daimon is that it emphasizes that you do not need to attain the "knowledge and conversation" of your Holy Guardian Angel. In the cosmology that permits the HGA, all of us are on the wheel of samsara, suffering through constant rebirth as we learn how to spiritually evolve. Connecting to our HGA in any lifetime is a massive development which can completely and irrevocably interrupt our normal lives. Because it is such an individual and serious choice, I was initially not even going to describe the HGA in this taxonomy. But while doing a deep dive into Tamiel, I recently came to realize that she is in fact my HGA. I verified this through multiple omens, divination, synchronicities, and further journeying. Soon after, I learned her "true name", a personal word shared between someone and their HGA whose potency is wrapped up in its secrecy and exclusivity.

I have other friends who have personally had their HGA show up and give them their true name in a dream. Evidently it's much easier than it seems, especially if you are open to it. I have come to realize that the feel of my HGA is in fact the exact same as the deep, inner intuition I've had throughout my life. As I've done more journeying and had more interaction with my HGA, I have come to understand that her mythical story is actually riddled throughout my own life. I am only just now beginning to understand the ways in which she is simultaneously me and I am her. Uniting with my HGA in journeys, in my imagination she embraced me with a kiss and planted a seed of light into my heart which she said would strengthen our connection. Since then, that quiet voice has grown louder and I have learned how to cut through the noise to hear it. And when it speaks, I feel an energetic glow around my heart area.

It's difficult to describe much more about my HGA experiences without getting more personal than fits here, but suffice to say it has been the most significant spirit encounter of my life. However, I am also lucky in that I managed to find my way to my life's path before even meeting my HGA. We basically met and then immediately understood our mutual goals and began collaborating on how to accomplish them. I also put a lot of time into healing my own patterns of fear, shame, guilt, and self-loathing prior to making contact with my HGA. For others who are farther away from their soul's plans, or who have inner torments, an encounter with their HGA could be disruptive or psychologically harmful. I consider myself a fairly experienced experiencer, and the HGA work has pushed and pulled me further than ever in my conception of what reality is and what is possible. The work of meeting, and then uniting, and merging with your holy guardian angel changes you. I sometimes feel as if my essential nature is changing. As I mentioned before, I do not advise deep contact with angels unequivocally.

Update: I wrote an extended post on Tamiel, if you’re curious and want to fall down my rabbit hole with her.

Tamiel, Holy Guardian Angel of Exile

The Universe, Source, "The" God, Creation Itself

In my gnostic metaphysical conception, The God, that un-thing that gave birth to all of reality and existence by daring to emerge from the undifferentiated nothing of the everythingvoid, is intrinsic to everything. Everywhere we look is Source, the Universe. The same rules apply: it reflects back what you expect and believe. As far as I can tell, experiencing a fire and brimstone God is really more about personal guilt and religious aesthetic.

So how do we talk to a Thing that is experiencing itself through us? One way to the universe is through becoming it--that is, Beingness itself. Think zazen meditation practices, metta loving-kindness meditations, contemplating the Tao Te Ching, that sort of thing. You can, of course, talk straight to the universe and plenty of esoteric classics such as The Bible will tell you: ask and you shall receive. The Universe, though, isn't a person; it's everything. It's the rhythm, process, and numinous intelligence embodying all existence in its doubled form of an elegant physical universe and the subtle latticework of hidden reality that keeps it all functioning. It cannot reply directly, but will bring synchronicities, events, messages, people into your life.

If you have doubts about if the universe is responsive, you can simply ask for a sign, or proof. Then pay very close attention. And then ask again. You can ask as much as you want, as many times as you want, because the universe itself is very patient for genuine need. However, it also has a sense of humor, and if you persist in demanding proof well beyond the point you know you have received it, it will start to mess with you. A great way to start that doesn't feel too hokey is the Rubik's cube test. It's pretty simple: fantasize deeply about Rubik's cubes, then look out for Rubik's cubes in an amount or circumstance far beyond the norm in the next couple weeks.

You can ask for things from the universe; manifestation. That's an entire branch of magic that is far more subtle than The Secret would have you believe. You can pray; you can express gratitude for existence's existence. Those esoteric classics including The Way of Hermes say that this is a great way to develop your soul, though I am not sure what exactly that means. I do know that learning to think magically, to see patterns, and to see the richness of a kind of order intrinsic to all things, makes the universe seem to come alive in a way where it is literally more synchronistic, more responsive, to thought and desire. As I have said on Twitter, ever since I leaned in to a "relationship" with the universe, my own destiny, and desire, I have one way or another gotten everything I've ever wanted.

Despite that, nowadays I don't spend a ton of time talking directly to the universe, though I spend plenty of time in awe and appreciation of the things around me and the life I get to live. Instead, most of my communication comes through divination with the planets and now my holy guardian angel. Angels are, after all, truly messengers. So I get my divine lowdowns from entities that can speak a little bit more directly. To talk to the universe you have to be able to learn to listen to the leaves rustle. It's a skill I've been trying to develop for years.

A Brief Picture

We've gone through a lot, and I've layered in various concepts throughout these descriptions. So here is a rough cosmological model that I use to understand my experiences, one I am constantly updating.

In the beginning, the infinite and formless created everything, and The Universe was born. (I skipped a few steps.) This included a league and hierarchy of angels who represent and communicate on certain key concepts throughout creation. Alongside this came many varied beings such as gods, elementals, demons, etc. to populate every possible conception and idea that came from the First Thought. Some, if not all, stellar bodies in fact possess intelligences and represent the physical presence in our world of various vast beings. As above, so below, so if a star is a being and can disintegrate into a black hole then gods, presumably, die and are born every once in a while. The planets are our local gods and custodians who oversee the functioning of their respective interests and realms. We come onto earth (or according to some sources, other planets with life) with certain plans and agreements and a holy guardian angel as a guide. To varying degrees we perceive this hidden, subtle world based on our life path, fate, and personal development. And to the amount that we can perceive it, we can learn from it and use it to improve our circumstances, our lives, and ourselves.

It's worth noting that this conceptualization is an incidental mapping that results from the frames and perspectives I have first encountered these beings and entities as. It's also one straight from the heart of western esotericism; other religions and spirit systems might not agree with a hierarchical construction of the world. It's also perfectly possible for these myriad systems of spiritual relationship and ordering (or lack thereof) to coexist. Wherever everything came from, the point seems to be to manifest every possible combination and experience. This simply happens to be where I have landed as a result of my cultural context. It's also completely possible that the very same entities are and have been related to differently across land and time, depending on how they were depicted, and which depictions were culturally transmitted by humans.

Conclusion

At this point, I have mostly discarded the epistemic distance which now only serves to hinder these experiences which continually grow stranger, stronger, and more powerful. Through the lenses of entity communication and spirit work, my ability to perceive and appreciate the resplendent diversity of reality, its sheer intricacy, beauty, and mystery. I have begun to understand my role in the universe, both in a large cosmic sense but also in a local one having to do with the humans immediately around me. I've been liberated from a postmodern, materialist cynicism about the future of the earth. Rather, I have realized that there are helpers everywhere who are deeply invested in protecting the world and its creatures, including us. In a broadly material world that can't see a point beyond one lifetime, spiritual recognition and awareness of our connectedness to everything. This doesn't mean giving up and disappearing in meditative trances while the world burns; rather, it means doing what I can to honor all of the experiences of my life, which ripples out into more caring for spirits, for people, for ecosystems, for the planet.

Ironically, encountering that which is considered impossible and unreal has made life all the more real. Being closer to the source of your own being, you begin to learn intuitively about fate and fortune and our roles in this life. While I used to consider metaphysics as an abstract excuse not to worry about the chaotic world we live in too much, direct entity contact has shown me that the world is absolutely ours to lose to greed, fear, and hatred. Not all of us will be called to become lobbyists for good causes or Nobel peace prize winners, but each act of love and connection we create with the world around us--human or otherwise--improves it.

At this point I can genuinely say I have found my path. Life is more beautiful, satisfying, meaningful, important, and bizarre than ever. I too, am dancing with the gods. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, but for those who are looking for some meaning outside of oneself and a love of metaphysical exploration, I recommend giving a planet a call.

1. "Planes" as in other "levels" of reality which cannot be directly perceived by most humans under normal conditions.

2. Theoretically speaking.

3. This isn't to say that communication from entities cannot be obviously clear and different from your own personality, but when you are first receiving entity contact it tends to be very subtle and can be easily overtaken by your own thoughts and feelings.

4. As an added bonus, I have found this work to be extremely personally healing.

5. It's worth noting that there is a difference between a planetary "intelligence" (an animist view of a literal planet's both physical and subtle consciousness which is much vaster and different to our own) and the unbounded god that the planet symbolizes.

6. This is a sensation I am used to and tends to be feedback for subtle interactions with entities but they can also be self-induced, making them tricky to use as a consideration in evaluating the entity contact. Generally I consider factors like suddenness, length, and power of the effect versus my typical capability for self-induced biofeedback.

7. In retrospect, this was actually correct according to sympathetic reasoning. By priming myself for a Venusian experience we could say I found the "frequency" of the pot deva by contemplating Venusian things and nature.

8. Hermes is historically considered a hermaphroditic, androgynous, nonbinary, and gender-bending god, so I refer to them as them and him as her and vice versa.

9. Another example is that the morning I wrote these two passages on Hermes, I was rolling around in bed unable to sleep, for some reason fixated on numbers and Mercury. I finally decided to wake myself at 4:03 AM, and decided to check the astrological chart of that moment. The rising degree was 4° 18' or 4.3° precisely, in the sign of Gemini, which is ruled by Mercury, in the term (a subdivision) of Gemini, also ruled by Mercury. This sort of synchronicity is both a hint, a communication, and a joke which is highly characteristic of Mercury's personality and how they "feel" in conversation.

10. I believe basically everyone has an innate, sharp intuition, but it is dulled by materialistic cultural frames, fear, trauma, rigidity, or any number of things that can cause someone to close themselves off from too much feeling.

11. Should you eat the offerings? Opinions vary. I've heard stories of animals turning their noses up at supposedly fresh-looking spirit-consumed offerings, but I also know some people will just eat the offerings afterward as well. I also imagine this depends on the being; for instance, the Moon would certainly want you to feed yourself, while Venus would certainly want to share with you.

12. How do we resolve the tension between two vastly different views of the structure of the universe? Personally, I take a "yes, and" approach to my metaphysics so I can fit more ideas into my head. In an essentially infinite spirit cosmology, a strictly hierarchical ordering of spirits could exist alongside others who do not follow such a hierarchy and have their own wills and ambitions. Or, those same spirits who function according to hierarchy in one culture serve completely different purposes in another culture, because of their emotional and social biases.

13. Entire credit to Holy Daimon by Frater Acher for the masterful history lesson which I have used for the summary here.

14. Exchanges with my medium friends who channel interstellar entities (covered below) suggests that worship and the act of relabeling gods can in fact cause them to split, or present a new face. They can also flow together in synthesis.