What's Your Inspiration?

I'm still trying to figure out how Legend of Zelda influences my polytheism. I know it influences my magic (PC magic for the win!) but I haven't yet felt any signs from any entities from the LoZ series that requires my attention.

But I do find that the games help me with ethics and the importance of doing what's right, since Link is often called to give up everything to save Hyrule.

Books and television, i.e. modern mythology, can be very inspirational to me. For a long time I resisted this, thinking it was in some way 'wrong'. I have Asperger's and can get obsessed with books or TV shows, watching/reading them over and over again. More recently I've realised that this is how my imagination works and my brain processes things. My mum tells this awesome story: she was impressed, when I was about 3 years old, by how I used to watch TV and really engage with it, following up by telling stories about the things I'd seen, drawing pictures of them, creating expanded worlds with them, etc. One day, the TV broke down. My mother rang my father at work. "I cannot be at home with this child without TV. I am going to the TV rental place and renting one, right now."



My grandfather encouraged this in me (one of the many things I adored him for). He used to tell me fairy stories based on a series I used to like to watch on TV, called Will o'the Wisp. It was a weird, cute cartoon with misfit magical characters. He created so many stories for me - fanfiction, I guess you'd call it now! - based on those TV characters. The wood near his house became Doyley Wood (the name of the wood in the TV show), and we always called it that afterwards. He even incorporated some Welsh faery lore into the stories! (My grandmother was Welsh and he adopted the country as his own a bit.)

Today, I still do this kind of thing. I don't write fanfiction, because I am a disturbingly terrible fiction writer - but I play with characters and situations in my head, and see where it leads to magical results. Most recently, I'm working on a Battlestar Galactica tarot deck, because I know those characters and their associated archetypes much better than I could ever know the characters in a traditional tarot deck. I haven't finished the deck yet, but it's working well for me so far.

Like Jack, I think my astral/journey work has been made a lot easier by indulging these vivid fantasy worlds in my head. It didn't take me long to learn how to journey to Otherworlds. I've been doing it most of my life. (Getting back, and grounding myself in the real world, can be a huge problem for me, as a result.)

I haven't done a lot of pop culture magic yet, as such. It's something I want to get creative and try. For example, a lot of the shows featuring otherworldly creatures that I've watched over the years (Buffy and so on) have developed my idea of magic in certain directions. Not like Charmed, but the stories that are more like, magic is part of our existence as beings that are connected with Otherworlds. I want to work more on that idea.

I've been doing this as well! I am making them on hexagonal cards, and incorporating the pip style from the Triad decks in the Reimagined show. It would be interesting to see how much our card design choices line up. BSG was a huge influence for me, mostly in that it helped me to feel better about my faith and solidified some of my more metaphysical beliefs.

Being inspired by SW EU has made me start doing less spell-writing, more impromptu energy work, using ideas about the Force pulled more from Legends and the new canon than from real-world cultures (not a huge fan of how appropriative the Jedi communities can get - lots of shared problems with New Age - so I go to the fiction first). It lines up well with stuff I've been working on for my recon practice regarding magic, animism, and order v. chaos. Once I stopped fighting the fact that it was a pop culture magical framework, it's turned out to be a huge benefit and added depth to an aspect of my practice I was never really good at.

The Valar and Valier have also been extremely important to me. Many of them were gateways to helping me understand or meet different Gaulish deities, or acted as important deities on their own. My imagination of them partly guides a lot of my unrelated UPG. Without Varda, I doubt Sirona would be as important to my recon practice as she is, nor would I have ever considered researching smiths without Aulë. They are at least partly responsible for me leaning towards polytheism as a kid.

I never got through American Gods because of how much I can't stand the trope where gods need human worship to survive. Feels like Christianity overlaid onto polytheism to diminish it. Definitely understand why his writing could be irritating. What is Shadow's relationship with Odin like?

I don't see anything silly about enjoying that. A lot of myth is comical or non-serious. (I mean... just look at The Táin, it's got some very non-serious moments!) I think people telling myths wanted to be awed as much as they wanted to be entertained, making a distinction is more of a modern idea, and comics really capture that in a way books don't anymore. It's a big feature of medieval literature, too. And it's so nice to hear that there's a piece of media out there talking about how the gods will always be there, regardless of what people think of them, since so much media likes to tell people that gods can only survive if people pay attention to them... but it's much more comforting to know that regardless of any dangers, they're looking out for people.