Spirits, perception, and connection

I’ve never fully trusted grimoires, or more specifically the description of spirits in grimoires. The reason is simple: The description is ultimately misleading. The description is one person’s attempt to share their experience of a given spirit and prescribe how that spirit will interact with other people. This can be problematic because of the assumptions that are brought into descriptions, both by the original practitioner and the people that subsequently read the grimoire and seek to connect with the spirits.

What I’ve discovered with my own spirit work is that working with spirits is a highly subjective experience, based in part on the individual’s subjective live experience and based in part on the subjective experience of the spirit and how that spirit shows up in relationship to the individual. The way a spirit interacts with me will not necessarily be the way that the spirit interacts with you or the way the spirit interacts with someone else.

This can be frustrating to people who want a codified experience of the spirits that describes how they’ll look, appear and interact with every given person. There is a certainty in the codified experience that validates anyone who does the work, but that validation would come at a significant to the actual experience of the spirit. In fact it might invalidate the entire purpose of the work!