by Demelza Fox
There is an easy way of finding the perfect god or goddess to work with – the deity who sings in the same language of your soul, who you were born to serve and work with in this witchy life.
And the secret?
Getting back to wicca 101 and looking at them Correspondence Charts in a new way.
You know correspondence charts?
All new witches learn about these: the lists of items that vibrate in resonance with a particular energy, the herbs and crystals and spices and colours and days of the week.
You might be looking to boost your finances, and you would check your charts to find what vibrates in resonance – cloves, bergamot, pennies, pyrite – and work them into your spell and your life.
Like attracting like, if you will.
I believe this theory of resonance isn’t just for bits of magical leaf and tree and rock.
I believe that we are all a part of a great cosmic correspondence chart too.
Just as almond has an alignment with wealth and prosperity, each of us have an alignment to a particular energy or divine vibration.
A particular deity, if you like.
In modern witchcraft this is known as a Patron Deity: your go-to God or Goddess who mentors you and fills your life with their energy.
Through working closely with this divine being, you grow on your spiritual path and may find yourself become a Priestess or Priest of the God/dess.
A vessel for their energy in the world, a kind of special leaky pot through which their light shines out.
So our work is just to listen to who we are and to figure out which divinities we vibrate in resonance with – who our essence sings to and shines in the world.
It’s not a hard job: you just follow your natural inclinations and obsessions.
You are likely to have a strong pull to a certain kind of Divine energy right away.
For example, I am infatuated with every single Goddess of Love who ever lived and breathed.
Aphrodite, bold Astarte, wild Freya, regal Rhiannon, dancing Oshun… I have always lapped up their stories and images, and I always found them glamorous and intoxicating, even as a little girl.
In addition to that, I have a passionate love of the arts: I became a dancer and a painter.
I learnt how to sew so I could make the beautiful dresses that haunted my dreams, and became a burlesque dancer so I could display the delicate lingerie beneath.
I read tales of courtesans and temple dancers, chasing the hidden mysteries of sacred sex and scarlet women through the centuries.
I resonate powerfully with the archetype of the Goddess of Love: it runs through my veins, self evident by my very nature.
In the Great Human Correspondence Chart, you find little me, Demelza Fox, nestled under the grand list that is titled “Goddesses of Love”.
However, humans are complicated, and just like a witches’ correspondence chart, a person or item can vibrate in resonance with more than just one thing.
Take our examples above: cloves, bergamot, pyrite and almond.
These all have an association with wealth and prosperity – they are very fine items to use in a witches’ charm to call in more financial fabulousness into your life.
However, cloves are also a powerful healing herb and can be used as an aphrodisiac to warm up a distracted lover.
Bergamot is also an effective curse-breaker and a bringer of good spirits.
Pyrite is also a powerful protective stone, shielding the wearer from negative vibrations.
And in addition to being a seed of prosperity and abundance, almond is sacred to the Goddess of Love and can be used in spells of beauty and fertility.
No element, no ingredient is ever two dimensional: everything is a unique flavour, a unique combination of energies and powers.
Nothing is ever totally black and white – it’s always the rainbow variety in-between.
Juno from the Vatican Museum; Image source: author’s own photo.
So too are us humans.
It is totally possible to connect deeply with more than one Deity.
In addition to being an obvious Venusian Devotee, I am deeply connected to and in long service of Morgan le Fay, the witch-priestess of Avalon.
Known for a long time as a Patroness of Witches, her checkered past has her as an ambitious social climber, a great healer, a devilish murderess, a learned lady, a faery maiden, a sexual demoness, a fair and beautiful queen and a mistress of magic.
She is good and bad and both and neither – faery morality manifest, holding opposites as truth, and slipping away into the mists before you can catch her.
Hers is the archetype of the sorceress, the sister, the priestess, the powerful queen everyone respects but doesn’t fit in with the rest.
She is a goddess concerned with power, transformation, and the underworld, and her sister-goddesses from around the world are Hecate, Circe, Cerridwen, Maeve and the Morrighan.
So in our great human correspondence chart, you will also find me under the specific list marked “Morgan le Fay”.
So here I am, a devotee of both the Rose and the Twilight.
And the truth is, each Goddess and Deity is multifaceted in themselves.
In addition to being a goddess of sexual love and beauty, Aphrodite is a goddess of grief, of witches and of hexing sexual offenders who has a tense yet tender friendship with Persephone, the goddess of the underworld.
In mirror, Morgan le Fay is a Faery Queen of the Sea and holds the power of the free sexual woman, taking lovers where she will and acting as advocate for women in love.
The gods are not one dimensional, and they do not exist in vacuums separate from each other.
So you never need to define yourself or label yourself by ONE deity, by ONE vibration, by ONE element: that obsessive pursuit of the one right way, no take-backs and everyone else is wrong is the realm of the patriarchy, not the way of the witch.
There is no One Right Way: there is only who you are, who is every shade of right and wrong under the sun.
(Also, let’s lump spiritual monogamy in with the patriarchy too: we can leave all that there-can-only-be-one-god-argh stuff where it belongs. Goddess is not exclusive, and the pagan gods tend not to operate the jealous-and-controlling-lover vibe in their dealings with mortals.)
It’s just finding what energy you are, which God calls to and lays claim to that energy, and embracing it – embracing exactly who you are.
How do you do that?
You stop pushing.
You stop trying to find an answer or making things happen, and you relax into who you are, into your interests and passions and the stories you love without making them a means to an outcome.
You allow your Patron Deity to arise naturally from your pursuit of you-ness, from immersing yourself in the energy you naturally resonate with, through chasing wild geese merrily through fields and seeing what you learn along the way.
Just chill out and they’ll turn up.
So what essence do you vibrate with – what is it you are all about?
In which correspondence table do you sit… and which ruling Gods and Goddesses might be your guiding stars?
IN CONCLUSION
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featured image via Unsplash