Question: Do you have any unusual or interesting UPG with Loki? 

I like this question because I have so many choices for stories to share. Like I said in my last post, most of the information we have about Loki today comes from personal gnosis. He is a god very close to humanity, so he tends to be around more than the other gods, in my experience.

Many of the unusual experiences I have had with Loki have come from times where he has horsed one of my friends. That friend is trained to handle divine possession, and, at least in my local circle, he seems to be the person that Loki prefers to horse. I have a working theory that it is because my friend emits a vibrational signal that is closer to the wavelength that Loki operates on than the rest of us.

Quite a few people in my local community are trained to handle divine possession, as we live in one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world. The ancient status of those mountains translates directly into how active the spirit world is here, and it is dangerous for those who are sensitive to spirits to go around untrained in this area. As an example of this, a new woman moved into my neighborhood recently, and it is not an accident that when the two of us met, I learned that she had a decent amount of spiritual strength but no training to keep her safe from spirits. Her apartment was mired in miasma, and an entity came through an unlocked mirror and tried to attack me while I was there. This type of occurrence is incredibly common in this area, so the experienced practitioners here tend to make it a habit to teach those with the strength to be attractive to malignant spirits how to defend themselves against them.

That was a bit of a tangent, but I want to emphasize the fact that I live in an area where encountering and dealing with spirits, the gods included, is just a normal part of life. In the Pagan groups in this area, most people have had direct experience with the gods and many of them are trained in divine possession techniques. That is directly related to how active the spirit world is here, due to the age of the mountain range. It is unusual to find many experienced practitioners in one area, as we tend to be spread thinly across the country and the globe. We are all aware of how strange it is, and we have all often remarked on how weird it is that this area tends to draw experienced spiritworkers almost magnetically towards it.

My experience living here is one of the reasons I so strongly advocate for stronger discernment; I’ve seen first-hand what happens when it isn’t utilized, and the results are often negative and far-reaching in their impact. Entering into rituals unprepared for the consequences can also have far-reaching implications, and that’s where this particular UPG with Loki starts. That said, it also involves the Morrigan.

One of the Pagans here, a Kemetic practitioner who also works with Loki (who blames me for Loki coming into his life) attended a ritual to the Morrigan that John Beckett facilitated during his visit two years ago. The ritual itself was pretty intense, and it was particularly intense for the aforementioned practitioner who, after the ritual was done and Beckett was back in Texas, found himself practically stalked by the Morrigan.

He came to me for help because while he had wanted to honor the Morrigan, she was stalking him to the point that it was causing physical and energetic pain. The friend I mentioned before who acts as Loki’s horse more easily than others was present for this conversation. The three of us discussed what we wanted to do, and we ended up deciding that calling on Loki to directly communicate with the Morrigan, since he is a god that has many connections to other pantheons, would be the best course of action. After all, who better to reason with a god than another god?

The Morrigan’s presence was very clearly felt by everyone in the room, and we determined that the best way for this particular discussion to happen was to ask Loki for his willingness to horse someone and confront her more directly. There was an exchange of goods for services rendered at some point (parts of the memory are hazy, which is normal when dealing with the gods when they horse someone), and Loki was suddenly very present in the room alongside the Morrigan, though in a way that was a bit more physical than usual.

From what I can remember of what Loki told us of the conversation with the Morrigan, he did his best to explain to her that getting consent from a follower was better than forcing it, but she seemed fairly determined to not take no for an answer. From what I can remember, Loki did what he could to try and help, but the Morrigan refused to be persuaded. Gods can be as stubborn, if not more so, than people, and the Morrigan absolutely refused to budge in her pursuit of this particular practitioner (At this point, the two of them have forged a slightly more healthy relationship but it will probably always be tainted in some ways by the fact that it was built originally off of coercion).

That was an experience that told me a lot about Loki and how he views consent. He was willing to intercede with a god from an entirely different pantheon to try to convince them that it was better to obtain consent from a potential follower than to coerce them into service. Some people might point out that we had to ask him for help rather than automatically receive it, but that makes perfect sense. After all, we were asking him to step directly into the path of another god who was hell-bent on getting what she wanted. That’s a rather volatile situation to ask anyone to step into, and we definitely gave Loki a plethora of offerings in return for his willingness to put himself in a potentially dangerous situation.

That experience also belied everything that I’ve ever heard anyone say about Loki being a coward who refuses to fight or put himself in danger, who prefers to run away from problems rather than solve them. This is an ironic view, considering the myths and how often Loki puts himself in danger; it’s a pretty regular occurrence, actually. There’s nothing cowardly about him, and if he does step down, it is out of respect for the person on the other side rather than out of fear.

I’ve learned a lot about Loki through experiences like this one, and I’m aware of how amazing it is to be able to have experiences like this. I didn’t start physically encountered gods until about three years ago, and what really helped facilitate that was to eliminate from my head the ideas engendered by Protestant society. I learned to suspend my disbelief when it comes to how gods can appear to us and accept that they can, and do, walk around occasionally in human bodies. That made it a lot easier to discern when a person was actually being horsed by a god and when they were just parroting. Physically experiencing the presence of a god is not an experience that is easily forgotten.