12/23/20 - Miniature Post, Teotl and Friends

Got a (pleasant?) surprise while surfing the net recently, in the form of Teotl in the Meso-American tradition. As a tl;dr, it's essentially a monistic, transcendent substrate to the universe, with objects in the cosmos being the visible manifestations of it (with duality being a key thing when forms arise). To break it down its sort of a panentheistic God + mana, universal numinosity sort of thing. Despite the invariable disconnect from my preferred aesthetics, it is sort of neat to see something from the family Heritage vaguely match up with my loosely defined transcendental-trickster-psi paradigm. Hilariously, it also seems to have shared the classic magico-religious ivory tower syndrome, with the priests doing the generic yet obvious thing with the numinous substance as a presence behind the polytheism of the common populace. This scenario always seems to end in a situation where the upper-class is more correct in theory but less so in practice than the commonfolk. This does make me wonder about Meso-American magical systems now, though I must admit that the territory is still very unfamiliar. It does seem like a broadly immanent and impersonal divinity is good justification for systems of natural magic, which does seem to have a legitimate pedigree of its own outside of the typical claim that it was only used as a way to avoid ecclesiastical censure (pro-tip, sometimes ask the historians and anthropologists rather than the occultists).