Djinn and fae and elemental and nature spirit are four ways of saying the same thing in different dialects. I have made some form of pact with an entity I've called out to under one of these names, so with that said, here are my thoughts on the subject of spirits.
In majiq, I find there are basically two categories of entity, and they're in all meaningful ways impossible to separate. There are internally generated phenomena that come across as entities in the mind, and there's stuff that's genuinely external, but nearly imperceptible. Like, people who have done a lot of work with summoning will attest that there's things that happen like the room suddenly feeling warmer or hotter, and this happens to groups of people too. But that's easy to brush off as imperfect air currents from the heating/cooling system of the building. After dozens of experiences, you stop thinking you're being fooled by a draft, but it certainly doesn't make for persuasive evidence to a dabbler or materialist.
I think what is really happening is it's like two soap bubbles merging in the bottom of the kitchen sink. They merge, pop, separate, but it's the same amount of air, just a tiny barrier creating the sense of division to create the idea of "a bubble". That's incarnation. All the soul energy is everywhere all the time, and the creatures and objects we sense are the divisions of that soul energy that creates "souls" (or "discrete packaged units of spirit-energy" if you're allergic to the word soul). In my view, "God" is the term used to describe all the soul energy in the current system, whatever its bounds are (i.e the multiverse), without barriers. In my metaphor, "God" is all the air on Earth, while "me" and "my djinn companion" are two bubbles in my kitchen. There's a lot of air (and bubbles) out there in the world.
That sense of an entity being in your presence is, metaphorically, the moment when one bubble splits into two, or when two bubbles merge and become one. It's a re-drawing of lines of division, but it's the same stuff inside, the same stuff making the barrier. The size and shape (that is, the expression of the thing) changes, but not its essence.
Even if you're on wifi right now, it's called an "air interface" in the telecom industry because it's doing the exact same stuff as a hardline, just with air as the conductor instead of a cable. Our devices are connected, and so are we. This is the moment where bubbles touch, merge and separate. I have a body now, but if I got hit by a train tomorrow, this post would remain. My spirit would remain in this post, to influence those who pass by and read it. That's the nature of spirit, it is enduring and expanding. With this post and my others on this site, my 'body' expands beyond the human form to include the servers WF is hosted on. Our shared body, the body of work of all the posters on WF.
I have done some arguably
dumb shit in my pursuit of greater understanding of the nature of reality and consciousness. I spent a winter in Las Vegas meditating under 5G towers in an attempt to spread my consciousness through the connected devices to the cell grid and thereby gain experience from more than one body at a time. While I did have some pretty sweet visions that correlated to my goals and made it feel like a success, I also got cooked by the 5G and had something resembling a sunburn despite sitting in the shade the whole time, so I don't really advise others follow in my footsteps and instead just accept my takeaway that yes, the internet is kind of a branch-off community "organ" that facilitates telepathy. That was my druidic pilgrimage to LV where I attempted to communicate with the wifi spirits, which I fully believe exist as a modern class of nature spirit. See also
my post on The Machine Spirit.
I did work in the woods to merge my identity with Oberon, King of the Fae, and my wife can attest we have fairies in our house. We leave them traditional offerings like the first and last crumbs and every now and then they repay us with a favor.
I have a complicated relationship with the elementals, which in my practice the air and water elementals are the weather spirits. I've been taking and integrating laypeople's suggestions for the weather for about seven years and I already understand why the spirits care so little about what humans want for weather, it's all over the place! Everyone has their own favorite season, their own favorite weather in it. I've merged and separated and remerged with the weather spirits so many times I take their attitude to the weather and create little games out of my rituals to keep it fun for me, like "summer ends when my fly kill average drops below 1/day" and keeping a running tally. I have a big stick I go out and shake at the sky to demand rain, knowing full well the only reason it rains after I do it is because the spirits find it hilarious to watch a modern man shake a stick at the sky in the middle of the city.
In my practice, I treat about half my dreams as being some sort of past/alternate life recollection. I view my body as a kind of filter, like a living sponge, that processes experiences that flow through as memories living within soul-particles that enter and leave my body at will. Part of my bargain with the fae was that I would trade a memory with them at the door every time I went between this world and theirs, and it sure as shit has happened. Mundanely it's explained by the fact that I have seizures and lose recall with them, but majiqally, it only started happening after I started thinking of myself as a real-life D&D wizard who forgets his spells after he casts them and has to reread his notes to remember how to cast the spell. After I bargained with the fae to trade memories for wisdom.
I can't recall the name of the elemental king of fire, I'm sure he has a few, but I did a thing where I burnt a lot of my notes as an offering to him. Like, whole notebooks full of writing. I was invoking that scene from Acts 19:19, the idea was essentially that because I didn't have a bunch of money to use as an offering, I could use my notes, which were
worth a lot of money.
It wasn't formal because of the nature of the entity, but I've been working with Eris as the face of The Goddess since I was a preteen. The principia discordia's description of Eris and Aneris explains the world so clearly, a greco-american take on the

, order by nature makes order out of chaos, and chaos by nature makes chaos out of order, and the world expands because these orders and chaoses are different from the ones that came before, increasing the variety of information in the world and preserving it against stagnation through this mechanism. Nothing makes for a relentless optimist quite like devoting yourself to chaos. It teaches you to enjoy the good times while they last because nothing lasts forever, and to shrug off the bad times because nothing lasts forever. It teaches you not to be upset when the world knocks down your pile of blocks because it used some blocks to knock it down and gave those to you when it did so.
I guess the best way to wrap this post up is to say, you're full of pacts with other spirits, every interaction with your environment is a subtle agreement with it. The planet orcus in astrology is considered the planet of oaths, and you can look at your placement and its transits to consider how your own personal approach to oaths guides your life philosophy or should be reshaped. Consider the ways you treat your coworkers, family, friends and property as subtle reflections of agreements you have with other pieces of Creation, and therefore, as expressions of YOU as an immortal spirit. If you break your video game controller in a rage, that's who you are forever. If you cut someone off in traffic, that's how your immortalized forever in their mind, and it is a subtle "contract" with that person. If you don't change the oil in your car, you've broken your side of the vow you made with your car when you purchased it, to take care of it. There's life in all things, and you'll prove it when you kill your car if you ignore the oil until your engine blows, you understand? And that car is a piece of you, an extension of you, so take care of your things like you're taking care of your own body.