Anthropomorphizing the Divine
And why I give spirits human faces
While working through all of the sigils of the Ars Goetia, a few thoughts kept tugging at me—quiet, looping thoughts, not unlike the sigils themselves. There’s something mesmerizing about the way each mark curves and turns in on itself. Some are symmetrical, others wildly asymmetrical. Some feel spare, even elegant. Others are almost architectural in their complexity.
The same, I realized, could be said for their names. Most were held over from wherever they were co-opted by the Christian Church and quite literally demonized. Humans love to sort and name what we can’t fully understand. Language gives us a handle. Categories offer a sense of control.
It’s the same instinct that led to demons being classified and cataloged in painfully biased ways. The same instinct that led us to speak names that, in truth, likely sounded very different thousands of years ago—or however far back we can trace them in the fragments of written history.
That desire to understand the unknown is very human. And that’s exactly where this blog post begins: in the deeply human impulse to give a spirit a face.
The Slippery Slope of the Human Form
When I’m working with spiritual entities—especially those that may never have had a body of their own—I often find it easier to communicate by allowing my brain to imagine a human figure. A face. A voice. A presence.
Now, that doesn’t mean the entity is human. It’s incredibly important to remember that they’re not. Even if you're speaking to the ghost of someone’s dearly departed grandmother—someone who was once human—that spirit is no longer operating in the same framework. It's changed. They’re noncorporeal now. Outside time. Beyond flesh.
That’s the danger of anthropomorphizing spirits: we can start to forget that they’re not people. They might feel familiar. They might act familiar. But that familiarity is often a kind of gift they give us—so we, the human, can better comprehend what we’re being shown.
A Visual Translator
That’s where I come in.
One of the ways I support my own practice—and, by extension, yours—is by offering a face to a nonhuman name. Think of me as a visual translator. A kind of touchstone. I take something formless and offer it just enough shape to give your psyche something to anchor to.
This isn’t doctrine. This isn’t fact. It’s art in service of understanding. It’s a collaboration between me, the spirit, and the person receiving the image. What results is not a photograph, not a literal depiction, but a representation—something symbolic, relational, and resonant.
And maybe this kind of representation doesn’t matter at all if you’re not actively trying to work with cosmic or otherworldly beings. If your guides already have a form (like a beloved ancestor, a deity with known iconography, or a familiar creature), you might not feel the need for translation. But for those of us working with spirits that defy the neat labels and fixed images, anthropomorphizing can be a helpful, even essential, tool.
Not because it makes the spirit more real.
But because it helps us show up more fully.
