I had a great conversation recently with a former student of mine. We were talking about the challenges of balancing human ethics with spirit etiquette. How do we avoid cultural appropriation when a Power from a culture to which we have no other connection decides to drop in and say “Hi” for whatever reason?

Novice spirit workers who have only public blogs from other spirit workers, devotional polytheists, and reconstructionist pagans to work from can come away with an impression that it’s just not supposed to happen in the first place. As if we’re each only ever talking to the specific Powers we have some kind of cultural permission to serve, and that anything else is Against The Rules somehow, and you can either accept those rules or reject them outright and face dire consequences. But in my experience both in private conversations with other spirit workers, and in my…