#the devil is tasked with bargaining for a soul of the fae

[lefaystrent]

A devil enters a fairy ring and pulls out a ridiculously large contract from their briefcase. "I've come to bargain."

[acrianswashere]

A real Occultist Debunks “Selling Your Soul”

Hot take this was ripped from my Wordpress, and Magick Journal I highly recommend checking out at the links above.

You ever read something so fuking asinine you want to claw your eyes out? Not everybody is Christian. Not every religion is Christianity. not all magick and holy sacred power comes from your Jesus. Selling your soul isn’t real. That’s not how this works beyond your feeble religious understanding. Today we’re going to be debunking Robert Johnson and how he “sold his soul” at the crossroads. Hot take: he didn’t.

For starters who is Robert Johnson? He’s a famous blues singer. He’s infamous for the before statement. Robert Johnson as a person doesn’t matter to much. I’m not really into blues and while I respect it as a genre with a history I could care less. What matters is this myth surrounding him and his music. Lots of people think he “sold his soul” for some kind of skill with the guitar. That, because he pledged himself to Satan he got his ability. Let’s get one thing out of the way. That doesn’t happen.

If you are familiar with this blog (I’m assuming you’re not) you’ll know I do magick. The real kind. Not that harry potter bullshit you see in movies. I am a left handed sorcerer who works frequently with demons. With the dark. Magick some people would consider to be black or inherently evil given the subject matter. Stuff drenched in what you stereo-typically view as the “occult”.

I promise you that the black man at the crossroads ain’t a demon but now we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Point is I do this shit for real. Solomonic tradition and the like. I’ve read my fair share of goetic based texts and fancy golden rimmed grimoires. I know demons well.

So why do I think as someone embedded in this that this is horseshit? Cus it is. When you work with spirits for any long period of time you’ll eventually have to pay them for their work. Nobody does any kind of labor for anyone for free whether you’re a human or a ghost. Spirits can be paid in a lot of ways from them asking you to write a song or throwing a rock in a pond, to giving them cake. Spirits can be paid with tasks or offerings. But your soul is worth nothing to them.

Your soul isn’t worth anything on the astral plane. It’s not something you can pay somebody with. It’s nontransferable. No one wants it and nobody will take it. You can promise your essence in devotion to someone, you can promise service, you can be a sword and a shield sure. But your soul is worth nothing. Nobody cares about it.

When it comes to dealing with the devil the myth arises from actuality. When it comes to demons or even other spirits like fae, you can bargain and barter with them. You can sign contracts with entities where they promise you something in exchange for something else. This something has to be something you can give them. Such as food, incense, art that sort of thing. You can’t really give anyone your soul it doesn’t work that way. 

Spirits do want stuff from you but they don’t want your soul. You can sign contracts with demons but they’re not gona ask for that in return. They may ask for something big but never that. It’s just not of value to them. They may ask for big metaphorical concepts like your divinity, your fame, or your loyalty but not your soul. Anything that’s asks you for your soul, chances are is trying to fuck with your head and only wants to parasitically feed off you. But we’re not gona get into Jellyfish here.

So yeah you can make an agreement with a demon, sign a contract with one also. But your not gona go to hell for it, and your certainly not giving them your soul.

Also Robert Johnson? Wasn’t a left handed guy. He was someone who practiced Hoodoo (not demons) which is a kind of African folk magick that comes from a variety of influences. Dollies are European In origin and while they made their way in some Hoodoo practices and even Voodoo it doesn’t change the fact that they are originally European.

[Barber, Chad. Infernal Conjure Craft. HADEAN PRESS, 2011. 1 vols.]

Hot take: it’s not cultural appropriation to work with dollies in that form. But that’s another misunderstanding and issue for another day.

So I mean reflecting did Robert Johnson do magick? Yes he did. He did Hoodoo. He references Mojo hands and other practices in his music. Those are Hoodoo things. Hoodoo ain’t evil. Just because it’s magick doesn’t make it “of the devil” and in retrospect that’s a super naive way to think of things. Especially given Hoodoo’s blend of cultures and origins which I’m not gona touch here because I am far from and authority on that matter.

 The world doesn’t revolve around Christianity and regardless of whether you practice Christianity or not you can’t really filter it all through that lens if you want a proper perspective. Other religions, other practices exist it doesn't mean its YOUR devil in disguise tempting people to sin via their belief.

[Yronwode, Catherine. “http://www.luckymojo.com/crossroads.html.” Luky Mojo Curio Co,

   www.luckymojo.com/crossroads.html.]

Hell, Christian Magick exists and the miracles Yeshua himself performed were inherently of a divine supernatural presence (you know the big guy). That’s magick whether holy or not. But now we’re detracting.

Point is regarding Robert Johnson, the dude did do magick. He did Hoodoo. That doesn’t mean that he sold his soul. Also the whole crossroads thing? Yeah there is a ritual you can do to achieve a skill set that is known as “that one crossroads ritual everybody talks about whenever the crossroads in magick are even briefly mentioned”. You enter in to an agreement with an entity known as The Black Man by going to the crossroads for a set time frame. Then he then aids you in your attempts to learn whatever the skill you asked for afterwords. 

It’s a Hoodoo ritual and I know so because I’ve done it. (See my magical journal entries night 1 through night 7) Certain pantheons have certain vibes and this one was African in nature. The exact origin or creator of it I can not tell you but it has a vibe that doesn’t scream to me demon. Plus some of my demons don’t get along well with him which wouldn’t of have happened the way it did for me had he been one of them.

We don’t really have any historical evidence that Robert Johnson himself even bothered to do this ritual. You can speculate but it doesn’t change the fact that we simply don’t know and what we do know we can’t pinpoint. We only have second hand sources from other people rather than statements made by the man. Crossroads are just a thing in Hoodoo. They are a thing in a lot of magick and religions. I mean the Greeks had Hekate. who is wonderful and that was/still is her thing. The heathens have Wodin. Crossroad deities are everywhere. They are not regulated to one specific faith or practice alone. Nor should they be.

So him singing a song about the crossroads or rituals related to it means absolutely nothing. Did he wake up good at guitar? It’s possible. Was a ritual involved? Yeah I’ll give you that. Did he sell his soul to do it? No. He didn't. The reason this association is even here in the first place is because of his friend Tommy Johnson. No before you ask they weren’t related. Tommy Johnson did this ritual. He painted it for whatever reason as a satanic thing and marketed himself accordingly. He also did Hoodoo so take that as you will. He wasn’t really as well known even if his guitar playing was better than Roberts. This was later adapted into a published fictional book where the myth of Robert doing it arose in popculture.

So that’s the truth it’s not as exciting as a conspiracy theory drenched in Christianity.  The ritual is real. I talk about it in my oddly titled book “how to sell your soul and other nifty things. A beginners guide to black magick.” which has yet to come out despite it’s misnomer of a title. if you want guides on that ritual I can’t really help you but earlier in this article I linked my journal experience of me doing the ritual which is the only deviation out there from the standard fair you find online. But it’s really best performed at an abandoned location for as long as possible, with information regarding it gathered from places outside the internet. (The internet won’t properly prepare you for this ritual you need to go buy some books).

So yeah you can do Hoodoo and a crossroads ritual to achieve a skill. You can sign pacts with demons. You can use magick to get famous even though we didn’t discuss that here. But you can’t sell your soul. It’s worth nothing. The crossroads ritual has nothing to do with the christian devil and you don’t go to any sort of hell for performing it. It’s possible that Robert didn't even do the ritual though that really is a matter of opinion at this point. Tommy did the ritual. Tommy marketed himself poorly. So maybe before you perpetrate a myth like this do a sting of research and discover that life is way more interesting and elaborate and magick is far more detailed than some industry based conspiracy theory about getting famous and good at shit with no effort.

My name is Acrians Locket. I’m snarky and bitter. My blog is currently aimed at beginners who have an interest in the real versions of this sort of stuff outside of hogwarts ridden movies. I hope you enjoyed and check me out. Chow

-Acrians Locket

Further Reading:

Baby’s first demons:

Best Book For Beginners

Companion to the keys of Solomon

Demon Dictionary

This Youtube Channel [e.a koetting]

This Youtube Channel [Orlee Stewart]

Other magick (not my forte though I’m exploring it right now so forgive the lack of links)

This Youtube Channel [Arziana EverDark]

This Author [Taylor Ellwood]

This Site [More traditional based shit, legit and good]

[I’m not linking any crossroads stuff it’s linked previously if you actually click the hyperlinks I included within my article.]

MY magickal Blog

MY magickal Youtube

My Magickal Journal

[astriiformes]

Okay so I don't know you or your character but your D&D campaign sounds really interesting what is it about, also who/what's your character I'm very curious

You’re in luck because I happen to Love talking about my D&D campaign.

We’ve been playing pretty consistently weekly for about a year and a half now so that would be a lot of plot to cover, but the general gist of the story is that the party members all signed on as crew members for a ship that, unbeknownst to us, was actually headed to the Faewilds, where one we arrived we were promised to an archfey Lady as tribute. She offered us the opportunity for our freedom, and the freedom of our captain, if we would complete a number of tasks for her, and passed a set of trials that proved we could be valuable. Thus far we’ve played out two of those missions (we headed back to the Faewilds for an interlude after the first, and are likely not too far from another one as we’re wrapping up our most recent arc right now). 

The first was an assignment to return a teen girl to her home in a kingdom on the material place, where we quickly got wrapped up in the politics of the scheming laird (her father) and a prejudiced cleric trying to purge fae influence from the castle, and learned the girl (who is a wild magic sorceress herself) had a twin sister who’d been banished from the castle when she was revealed to be a dragon -- both girls had very fairytale origins, as a gift to their mother from the fae when she was worried about producing an heir. The arc came to a head when towards the end of the week we’d been tasked with staying, a beam of light that produced portals to other planes in the presence of magic shot up from the center of the castle and we had to figure out how to seal it away. We also ended up dealing with a lengthy subplot to resurrect my character, despite being very low-level, after his untimely and accidental death, that resulted in him gaining unpredictable wild magic powers of his own once he was brought back to life.

The second arc took us through a portion of the world being overrun with undead shadows, which turned out to be produced by a demon that a town had summoned in order to offer as tribute to a mysterious but powerful entity in the nearby woods. The demon was bound with the help of a devil they’d made a bargain with -- who just so happened to also have been a crew member on the ship that was responsible for the death of our pirate rogue’s former crew -- and both were going to be owed a number of souls once the contract was up. Our assignment from our patron, to return a favor to a hag, brought us to her private demiplane where she runs a sanctuary for monstrous creatures -- which was going haywire due to the influence of a portal to the Negative Energy Plane that had formed at its heart and brought back (as undead) both a long-dead civilization of noble giant isopods and the evil morkoth that had enslaved them. When we defeated it and returned to the Material Plane, we determined that the mysterious force in the woods plaguing the townsfolk was actually one of the civilization’s forgotten gods, also resurrected as undead by another portal. With their help, we were able to challenge the terms of the devil’s contract and free the townsfolk from the requirement of offering any souls (which is good, because they had wanted to offer her ours!) -- making an enemy of the devil, who disappeared for the time being, but will absolutely be back to plague us once more, if her words are to be believed.

During the second arc, we also made allies of a couple of planar researchers that are part of a secret society called the Gatekeepers, dedicated to protecting the world from dangerous planar breaches, which the Material Plane as been seeing more an more of (a fact which our wizard is in some way responsible for, after accidentally bringing forth an eldritch creature of some kind in her backstory, but which even she doesn’t know much about), and recently we headed to the university town they’re based out of to seek information and potentially become affiliated with the group ourselves. That’s where we are now, though soon we’ll be headed back to the Goblin Market that will take us back to the Faewilds and, probably not long after that, our next assignment.

My character is a high elven ranger named Erwyn Cestacelvar who has been trying his hardest to study planar portals and creatures for decades, after witnessing a horrible disaster in his youth in which a powerful demon came through a portal and destroyed an entire university town. Unfortunately, that’s highly classified information in our world unless you’re affiliated with an academic institution, and Erwyn is actually a drop-out of the prominent magical university he was attending after accepting that he had little inclination or ability for wizarding magic. He’s a very nervous, anxious young man with pretty poor self-esteem, partially as a product of failing his studies, but who wants to be good and do good more than anything. Very soft-spoken and fragile physically, but an overall strong and stubborn person with a big heart, if also pretty strict morals and some significant social obliviousness. And despite being fairly gentle and kind, he’s capable of being one of the more ruthless members of the party, with a bit of a “beware the nice ones” vibe. I love him SO much. Our whole party is really, really good though.