Our Spiritual Allies

Despite the fact that most of the pagans and polytheists we personally know have more frequent interactions with non-deity spirits than they do with the gods, it’s uncommon to see people talking about these spirits online. This may be in part because of the stigma around having frequent spirit visitors (hell, even when those visitors are gods, there are even people in the pagan community who will see that as “crazy”), but I think that the only way that stigma will eventually go away is if people talk about it openly. Thus, Kalith and I have decided to write up this post about our own little cadre of non-deity spirits.

We’ve divided them roughly into two groups – our housemates and companions, who either live with us or interact with us frequently, and our visitors and other allies, which include our spirit guides and other spirits with whom we’ve had significant interactions. Any pictures included here are close to what these beings look like, but not exact.

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Our Housemates and Companions

Kenara – Exile by Taryn Knight

Kenara

I’ve already written a full post on Kenara here. In short, she is a lilim, a child of Lilla, with whom I share a body. She and Kalith are in a semi-casual relationship, and she and I work together on occasion in the Dreaming when we have mutual clients.

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The Red-Headed Woman – Lisya by Antonio De Luca

The Red-Headed Woman

The Red-Headed Woman is the closest spirit companion of Kalith’s. Basically, he was sort of her parole officer until recently, after he had grown to understand her motivations and methodology better. They don’t share a body the way Kenara and I do, but he can and does channel her on a relatively frequent basis – she particularly likes to show up as a recurring NPC in games we DM. We do know her real name, but she prefers not to share it publicly.

She was once mortal, and in her first life, she served as a necromancer and an assassin for the dead – for example, if a ghost had suffered a wrongful death and wanted vengeance, she was the one who carried out their will. In her next life (which was in an Unveiled realm) she became a vampire. She subsequently founded her own assassin guild, the Nameless, which is active in many realms. She and many of the members of her guild are devotees of the Morrigan. She’s somewhat sociopathic, though she has a strong sense of justice in that she largely accepts assassination contracts on the powerful and corrupt. She’s also asexual – she views seduction and sex as unpleasant but sometimes necessary tools. Some of the members of her guild are shadowkin, including some of my court.

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Mogrin

Mogrin is our household gargoyle; he came with the statue above when Kalith purchased it. He keeps watch over and maintains our wards. He’s a grumpy bastard and he likes to complain about our other spirits (particularly the Fae), but deep down, he genuinely cares for everyone. He loves the smell of mulled cider, so we use a mulled cider candle to recharge our wards.

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Calcifer – Fire Imp by Mystofeles

Calcifer

Our resident imp. Kalith had the brilliant idea to name our electric stove this after watching Howl’s Moving Castle, in which Calcifer is a character who lives in the titular Howl’s stove. Less than two weeks later, he was cooking bacon (the character Calcifer’s favorite food) on that same stove when he accidentally spilled the bacon grease and started a fire. Luckily, he was quick to respond and put it out before it became a major hazard, but I couldn’t help pointing out that we’d never had a stove fire before we had named it Calcifer. Over the next few months, it became clear that an imp had taken the naming as an invitation to move in. We don’t know the imp’s true name and he’ll likely never tell us. He moved with us, and is very happy to have a gas stove to reside in now. He likes to play pranks on Arya and has something of a crush on her.

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Arya’s true form – Emerald Peacock Secret Keeper by Melody Pena

Arya

Arya is our cat. While technically she’s not a spirit since she’s embodied, she is a faerie dragon in spirit. Both Kalith and I have had times where, half-asleep, we’ve seen her in a draconic form similar to the image above, except her wings are avian. She also has draconic traits, such as a love of sitting on piles of stuff (particularly paper and coins). She really likes playing with imps; when she was younger, she used to rip through our wards with portals to their realm. She doesn’t do that anymore, though I think that’s mainly because she has Calcifer as a playmate now.

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Piko

When I started to unconsciously delve into the darker reaches of the Dreaming about three years ago (I was waking up to psychic attacks from nightmare creatures that had tracked me back to the waking world), Kalith and I decided to search for an entity familiar with the Dreaming to guide and guard my sleeping self. We found Piko at a Renne faire; she had taken up residence in the statue above. She agreed to serve as my guardian, we bought the statue (incidentally, the display statue was the last one available, so we didn’t even have to transfer her to a different one), and we took her home. Later, I found out that she was shadowkin. She was the first shadowkin I had (knowingly) met who was friendly towards me, and when I learned of my queenship and that many of my court were also shadowkin, she helped me to get past my assumptions about them. Her official title is as my Herald (though general-helper-person-of-awesomeness would be more accurate), and she serves as my regent when I’m not at court.

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Spiritual Visitors and Other Allies

people of my court, more or less – Elven Trackers by Mark Winters

my Court

I am a sacred queen and a viceroy of the Morrigan. The spirits in my court are Fae (mostly wood elves and shadowkin) and the land I represent for them is the Dreaming. My court is unofficially aligned with the Winter court, and I have plans to make that allegiance official soon. Due to political drama at the Yule Ball in 2013, I moved the court from Faerie to Kalith’s residence in the Otherworlds, which is something of a hub for mercenaries and travelling warriors. Initially this was a temporary move to protect my people, but most of my court preferred having a larger fighting force to defend them and many were able to re-establish their lives locally. We maintain portals to Faerie on our former lands and diplomatic ties with several other courts, including Shasta’s court.

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Shasta – image by Soa Lee

Shasta of House Brightwing

Shasta is a faerie queen and the viceroy of Summer in her particular region of the Fae Lands. Kalith saved her life, and her father (who was the reigning ruler at the time) offered him a job as her personal bodyguard and trainer. He has fought for and alongside her on numerous occasions, eventually earning the position of Champion for House Brightwing. She’s diplomatic, resourceful, and an avid lover of everything shiny. She has an inordinately large collection of tiaras. She’s still young for a faerie, and rules alone without king or consort.

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Kaya – Marion du Faouet by Lowenael

Kaya

Kaya is Kalith’s spirit guide and mentor. She was the main one to teach him how to be a Hunter, the history of the path, and to help him find his own purpose and meaning along it. In her life, she was the second Huntress in history. Her soul was originally a Shard of Freyja. She’s ancient and quite powerful – the one time Kalith challenged her to a duel, she knocked him across the room with no effort at all. She may very well be deity-level, we’ve just never witnessed her multilocate.

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Arwen – Isadora from Harbinger Chronicles by Gordon Napier

Arwen

I’ve already talked about Arwen briefly, along with my spiritual mother and her side of the family, here. Starting when I was eight, Arwen trained me in magick and taught me how to gain a measure of control over my forays into the Dreaming. She is a Winter Fae (an elf, to be precise) and my grand-niece on my mother’s side. She is also shadowkin, though I was unaware of this when I was young. She married a neighboring king, and during her tenure as his royal consort, she fell to the Shadow. With the help of others in my family she was able to regain control of herself and her powers, but by that point she had already done irrevocable damage. Subsequently, she sealed herself away and now only interacts with others via astral projection.

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Luna Mariam – Renaissance Angel by ellaine

Luna Mariam

My spirit guide, who came into my life at around the same time as Arwen and helped me to make sense of the memories I had from “S”. She is an angelic emanation of Maryam Magdalene; her duties include observing the stars and ensuring they’re on their proper paths. She referred to me as a “princess of the angels” long before I’d known or accepted my angelic heritage or my father’s former status among them. Contact with her faded off once I started to communicate with Maryam Magdalene directly.

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Kaeva & Krona

Kaeva and Krona were longtime spirit companions of Kalith; he doesn’t work with them much anymore due to shifts in his path, but they’re still our friends and allies. Kaeva is a shadow wolf (elemental shadow – Kaeva is not shadowkin), a tracker and stealthy-type fighter, even-keel and stalwart. Krona is a storm raven (he looks like a normal raven but with a white lightning bolt mark on his back) and scout, cheery and talkative. Kalith mainly worked with them when he was on the hunt, but he also sent them to guard people when he couldn’t guard them himself.

 

On My Spiritual Father, Part Two: Personal Insights

Alright folks, it’s time for part two of my posts on Samael (read part one here). This will be mostly focused on my personal experiences with him and with my angelic heritage, so major UPG warning here. He has many faces, and his personality shifts greatly between some of them, so do keep that in mind if the experiences I describe don’t match your perception of him.

My first experiences with Samael were through dreams and fiction. I remember from the time I was about 8 up through my teen years having very vivid dreams of being chased by angels. Even in my days as a Christian, I knew the angels were sent by Yahweh and that they were fighting the devil. In every single one of these dreams, my perception of Yahweh and the devil would always switch from the traditional Christian view to that of a petty, angry god with a vendetta against an ultimately kind and loving “devil”.  In these dreams, I saw Samael in what I would now call Lucifer form, shining bright and commanding his own angels. I didn’t understand that at the time – I was only just starting to perceive the pettiness of Yahweh, which of course contradicted what I’d been told in Sunday school, but the concept of a kind devil boggled my mind. I knew the dreams were important, and that they felt vivid enough to be real, or a memory, but it would take fictional stories to bring home their meaning to me.

On top of this, I appeared differently in these dreams than in many others – I looked somewhere in my mid-twenties, with long, light-toned hair, and I had wings, peregrine falcon wings that were about 30′ from tip to tip when fully stretched out. On rare occasion, instead of a peregrine pattern, my wings were a gradient from white at the shoulders to deep crimson red at the tips. I didn’t think to question why I had wings at the time, but my spiritual guides did. Shortly after I began to have these dreams, my angelic guide who identifies as Luna Mariam introduced herself to me and called me a princess of the angels. While I had no reason to doubt her, this confused me – how could I hold such a title, as a human? What had I done to earn it? I imagine she probably facepalmed when that’s where my thoughts led. I was to later learn that Samael held title of archon, roughly translatable as prince, when still in service to Yahweh.

The first guise in which I began to understand Samael was as The Lone Power in Diane Duane’s So You Wanna Be A Wizard. Here he is seen a fallen Power (divine beings presented as somewhere between archetypes and gods), the creator of entropy who takes the appearance of a willful, sly, cool-headed businessman. In this story, he stole and hid away The Book of Night with Moon, which essentially contains the blueprints from everything in existence and is sometimes read from to remind things of what they truly are. The main characters are tasked with recovering this Book and end up fighting him in the process. However, he is ultimately presented as morally ambiguous rather than evil, as the following excerpt demonstrates (note: the book indicates mental communication by enclosing the thoughts in parentheses):

(… That one’s most terrible power, they say, is his absolute conviction that he’s right in what he does.)

“He’s not right, then?” Kit asked.

(I don’t know.)

“But,” Nita said, confused, “if he’s fighting with… with Them… with the ones who made the bright Book, isn’t he in the wrong?”

(I don’t know,) Fred said again. (How am I supposed to judge? But you’re wizards, you should know how terrible the power [of] belief is, especially in the wrong hands – and how do you tell which hands are wrong? Believe something and the Universe is on its way to being changed. Because you’ve changed, by believing. Once you’ve changed, other things start to follow. Isn’t that the way it works?)

In the end of the story, the main characters banish the Lone Power by reading his name from the Book – but they make a small change to it, allowing him the possibility of reconciliation with the other Powers should he choose to set aside his pride. He ends up taking this offer up a few books later, though there are aspects and forms of his that continue to act against the other Powers, and it’s implied that this will always be the case because the Powers exist outside of time. The series continues to portray him ambiguously, and one book even focuses around a seemingly paradisiacal culture who never grew to their full potential because they had refused his gift of death.

Samael as the Lone Power – stars remain silent by Saarl

It wasn’t until I began rereading this series recently that I realized how much my younger self had recognized Samael within the Lone Power, and how that portrayal subsequently influenced my perception of him in the Dreaming. Another hugely influential book series for me was the His Dark Materials series, which spoke less to me about Samael and more about the troubling nature of the god I had grown up believing was ultimately benevolent. It’s also the series that introduced me to my matron Sophia and to the philosophy of Gnosticism as a whole, though at the time I didn’t know much about historical Gnosticism and had very little context for the kind, feminine presence that would give me cryptic advice when I asked for it.

When I was about 11, I started drifting away from the church and looking into anything I could get my hands on about alternate spiritual beliefs. Although my first pull was towards Egyptian religion and I dove headlong into worship of Aset, W’sar, and Bast among others, I never really felt at home there. Aset’s presence felt familiar, but it wasn’t quite the same as the presence I later identified as Sophia and I never felt at leave to speak with her as I did to Sophia. I will likely always feel a warmth towards the Egyptian pantheon, but the intense devotional affection I first felt faded off after a couple years. There was something more to be discovered, and I wasn’t sure what it was.

I was actually introduced to the term Gnosticism through Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. The concept of the Magdalene and Yeshua being married also deeply resonated with me and jolted a number of memories, though there was plenty of information in the book that didn’t feel right and was distorted both from historical data and my UPG. When I delved into Gnosticism, I found a much greater resonance with the books of Tau Malachi, an elder of a living Gnostic tradition called Sophian Gnosticism. Interestingly, Samael and Lilla are both honored within Sophian Gnosticism as dark faces or aspects of Logos and Sophia, respectively, counterpart to the light aspects of Yeshua and Mari Magdalene. In turn, Logos and Sophia are considered the masculine and feminine sides of each other, a balance reflected in all dualities and in ourselves. While this is much more syncretic than I literally believe, it’s good to keep in mind that Gnosticism is much more a philosophy than a religion, and primarily concerned with self-development through knowledge of the divine.

In any case, by this point I had done plenty of research into Lilla and my connections to her children, but this was the first I had connected the name Samael to the figure that I knew from my dreams. Puzzle pieces clicked into place, and my guide’s term for me began to pester at the back of my mind but I didn’t think to connect it to Samael just yet. I think, really, it came down to having accepted that I was odd but being scared to face what it was that really made that so. Subsequently, Samael began appearing both on his own and with Lilla in my dreams with greater frequency, and the clue-by-4 was swung hard.

The dream I most vividly recall was when I was about 14. I was out of body and the door to my room opened. Instead of the usual entrance to the hallway, the path beyond was dark and smokey. Lilla stepped out, looking none too pleased to be there, and held her hand out to me. I took it and was pulled through the blackness into a large, dimly lit cavern. Sitting on at a chair and table in front of an ornate entryway carved into the cavern walls was Samael. Though he had dark hair and wings here, I recognized his build and the same fierceness in his eyes that shone through his whole form in my earlier dreams. He motioned for me to sit, as well. Lilla leaned against a pillar and glared at the both of us with a look somewhere between anger and boredom.

It was there that Samael told me quite directly and formally that I was his child. In retrospect the attitude of Lilla towards me at the time makes much more sense – him legitimizing another heir, though I’m nowhere high enough in line to possible inheritance of his kingdom, meant another person to compete with her children when that time comes. I balked at the idea at first. Though I was learning about him more through Gnosticism, I still perceived him as a deceiver and I thought that this may have been a ruse to confuse me from my spiritual path. He was very patient with me, and through many other dreams, I learned to see him more truly as a being who wears masks of cold rationale and business savvy but is, at heart, as loving and passionate as the day those feelings were directed towards his own father and god. He has never lied to me, and has said that it’s simply bad business to tell untruths, though he is fond of using words and their layers of meanings to his advantage. This is something I soon recognized in myself, and for this and other reasons I vowed to never lie again.

Once I accepted that I was his child, more things connected. A vision I’d had while mirror-scrying of three golden lines over my shoulder, a glimpse of a person with the same golden lines at the hem of their sleeves and skirt who I knew was “Sama’ile” (child of Sama[el]), the fondness that bees had always had for me and their stripes, and the connection of bees as totems to some royal bloodlines of Europe, bloodlines I knew I was connected to before I did the digging and found the proof of that connection in family lineage. I have some strong UPG that this descent from Samael is both spiritual and by blood, though greatly distorted in conspiracy theories from all corners of belief. Really, if this is the case, then the vast majority of Europeans and their descendants are related to him (as they are to Freyr and his kin via the Ynglings), and that doesn’t automatically make one whit of difference to your spiritual self or capabilities thereof. I do think the blood tie reinforces the pre-existing spiritual link, though, and may help explain why most of the lives I can recall after my initial incarnation from Faerie have been European or otherwise tied to his lineage.

I continued to dream of him and learn more about him throughout my teen years and beyond, though for a time I was blind to magick through a self-imposed block after having been attacked by a demon from ages 14-16. Even so, my dream life became more vivid than ever and I began awakening to powers of air and wind that I believe are sourced primarily from him and secondarily through my Fae kin. Around age 19, with the help of my beloved Kalith, I broke through that block and have been working on my Sight since. One of the first things that happened when I broke it was a spirit started coming around the store that I worked at. I helped it to move on and let go of the rage that bound it here. I have since been a guide to several dead both to and past the gates of their underworld, though this is nothing close to a primary duty for me. It’s only recently that I connected this with Samael’s role as former angel of death, and I am starting to understand what else this nature as a guide may be connected to, for better and for worse.

A week ago, I took an important step and decided, for multiple reasons, to honor Samael as my patron rather than Loki. The short of it is that Loki, while helpful, does not visit that often (aside from the small transfer of patronage ritual, I have not seen him in months) and I feel like in some ways Loki was here to help me work on issues based around my mortal father and step-father so that I could more fully trust Samael in the role of patron. I will still honor Loki and his kin, but I feel like I need to focus on learning more from Samael, especially with regards to my angelic nature.

During this ritual, Samael told me that if I was to take him as patron, I would need to see all his forms and not just the kingly, businessy or Lucifer forms that I most often see him in. He flashed quickly through several of them, most of which I knew he had but just had never met him in before – the passionate messenger of Yahweh, the devil of Hell, the grantor of death, the highly disconcerting form as a serpentine seraphim, and, hardest of all to face, his form as my personal shaitan, my greatest obstacle in this life, my stepfather.

I could not have faced that form and stood my ground without lashing out or crumbling into tears a year ago, before I underwent yet more therapy at Loki’s insistence. For that and many other things besides, I give thanks to Loki and the time he spent as my patron. It only lasted a few seconds, Samael in the form of my stepfather raving deep in a rage, but it felt like much longer. And when it was over, he came back to the familiar form as lord to his cold realm, and sincerely apologized for scaring me. There was little I could respond with but a curt nod of acknowledgement. Then, in a rare display of familial affection, he pulled me into a hug and let me cry on his shoulder.

Samael is a study in opposites and multitudes, all of which coexist in himself; among those forms is a mirror reflecting your – yes, YOUR – greatest obstacle. He made me face my own, and I cannot say I appreciate that yet but I at least understand it. He is angel and devil and god, passion and rationality, prince and outcast, illuminating knowledge-bearer and weaver of truthful fictions. And he is my father.