Working with Pop Culture Characters

Recently I wrote about how I work with the First Officer of Voyager, Chakotay.

Anyone can work with TV or movie characters to help them in magic and in internal work.

We can use promotional material from the studio that picture the character, or toys of the character, to connect to that particular character. In my case, I used a Voyager officer teddy bear as a physical connection to the character. For other characters, you may use props that were created for that character – such as a wand for a Harry Potter character.

Working with a character that is portrayed in a TV-Show or Movie can be tricky. The character is played by an actress or actor, and we need to be careful to work with the character, and not the person playing them.

In my work with Chakotay, I very explicitly am working with the character. The Actor who plays the character, Robert Beltran, is still around, and I don’t want to impact him directly. I don’t know what kind of person Beltran is, so I don’t know what kind of energy he would bring to a working. Also, and possibly more importantly, I don’t have any relationship with him, nor do I have any reason to think that it would be okay to work with his energy or life.

Whatever the system we use, it is upon us, the magic workers, to do our best to understand the impacts of our workings. If we are working with characters to help us in our workings, we need to be sure to work with the characters.

Actors are not their characters, and we have no reason to conflate the two in our workings.

Image of Chakotay is a promotional image from Voyager Season I. Image of Robert Beltran from Wikipedia.