My first thought: how Swedenborgian in its resonances! For me, the idiom of Swedenborg's writing is so constrained by 18th c. Christianity, focused upon The Lord, and I can't swallow that, or parse it out to see the spirit worlds that lie behind that Worship. There might be a path through Transcendental conceptions of 19th c. New Englanders, but they are also crusted with woo. Perhaps that crust could be peeled off and discarded...

The next thoughts were of that which lies behind my photographic work in graveyards and with rock and wood beings. I say wryly that the faces are REAL, that they look out at me and are in some sense living beings; and that the memorials in cemeteries are more than carved rocks of material appearance, that they reach forward in time as well as back into the memories of the living.


There's a distinction to be made between 'ancestor worship' and veneration -- the former being mostly empty ceremony, the latter being the vastly more subtle means to ongoing connection with antecedent generations, materially encoded in mtDNA, and so on...

My mode of approach to the spirit world is to make light, to speak (and photograph) jokingly of the mysteries my material-world tools and coceptions are inadequate to encompassing. And so I'm comfortable wit the Pratchett and Gaiman versions, with /imaginary/ and /fantasy/ approaches to the ineffable, for the wisdoms they embody as Tales. Thus, Granny Weatherwax's Headology nudges a Truth: "...a form of folk psychology that has power because people believe it does." And the Small Gods, who are 'small' because they have few believers. And Dunmanifestin as the retirement home of the gods...

https://www.lspace.org/books/synopses/small-gods.html