On the Locality of Spirits

[iseht]

I searched a bit and couldn't really find anything on this. I'm curious what thoughts you all might have on evocation of spirits and the location of the ritual. The Neoplatonic traditions have the framework where spirits occupy a universal medium that is accessible from anywhere, like a fractal unfolding. On the other hand, we have the genius loci that are present in just about all Animism frameworks. I've sort of always reconciled these by associating the genius loci more as manifestations of objects and places, localized egregores I suppose, whereas more universal spirits like the many faced deities would of course be reachable anywhere, so in this sense all are local, it is just a matter of strength of the signal, so to speak.

What really muddled this for me was contemplating djinn which seem to break my current model. One can conjure a djinn from cold and rainy Oregon, but they strongly associate with the use of the Islamic language and are also deeply tied to physical place in Islamic tradition, implying that location and culture strongly influence either the chances for them to appear, or the diversity of djinn that one can reach.

 

[Morell]

Love the question. Jason Muller speaks about this in his Consorting With Spirits. There are definitely spirits that are connected to the certain places and there are those that are loosely connected and those not connected at all.

Some examples:
Spirits of ancestors or relatives - tend to be connected tot he place where they used to live. Can also be summoned by descendants, but might refuse foreign people, it also seems that they would refuse faiths and traditions they did not have.
Spirits of the places - those tend to be strictly connected to the place that is their home. Either they simply live there, or they were bound to that place. White lady can appear in the castle and can be summoned there but nowhere else. Spirit of one certain lake will appear at the lake or close to it, if it is possible, not not in distant places. You can even think about dryad that is connected to one tree and to no other place.
Local gods - Usually all tribal gods are local gods, because their myths are related to some specific place. Like Celtic and Norse gods are primely connected to north part of Europe. King Arthur and Merlin are connected to England. In history they were local myths and legends and beyond their area of influence they were not known really and were connected to the known world of the people that worshiped them or worked with them. Kind of issue today, because it's hard to tell if they are working with people that only are from bloodline or are in the location. That seems to be not really true anymore, though it can still be problem for example with Norse myths in southern hemisphere. There are less known deities that are way more locally bound so probably fame among humans is a factor... in the end Hebrew people wrote their legends as local spirituality too.
Global spirits - angels live in Heaven so they do not in the basics have any location they would be restricted to or restricted from. And those "universal" gods, like the god of Abraham. Or Buddha, I believe... This is relatively new thing actually, that is present only thanks to information sharing and global culture and pop culture if I may say so.

It might be kind of disadvantage that you can learn about any tradition without ever getting in touch with that tradition. Spirits don't have it easy with us. It almost looks like we are starting to demand them to come to us as an ordered package instead of going to the place where they themselves live. But then it has an advantage too, when we can actually really learn and find the tradition that we want to follow the most. An Age of Chaos... Lol.