Another way to get in touch with different perspectives of your identity is through aspecting. I was first introduced to aspecting as a magical act through Lupa's experiment with creating four aspects of her identity that drew on different parts of her personality. She based these aspects off the Leary-Wilson model of the eight circuits of the brain, as described by Wilson in Prometheus Rising. Her four aspects drew on Wilson's observations on the four personalities of transactional analysis. She combined this experimental psychology with animal totemism. Two of her aspects were wolves, one representing hostile weakness and the other friendly weakness. The other two were a cougar representing hostile strength, and a cat that represented friendly strength (Lupa 2007). She used these aspects to explore facets of her identity that she knew existed, but hadn't felt fully comfortable exploring. This allowed her to experiment with different personality traits and get a sense of how those traits fit into her life. She based the animals off of totemic entities that could guide her in creating believable personality aspects that she could use in getting to know herself better. Mace also suggests that the creation of entities based off of alienated behaviors can also be useful for coming to grips with those behavior patterns (Mace 1996). By distancing the behavior from the sense of self, the magician can comfortably deal with it and make peace with it, before integrating it back into hirself.

Likewise, in hindsight, I realized that my interaction with different pop culture characters allowed me to explore facets of my personality. I would use the aspects of them to safely explore those personality traits until I felt I could integrate my understanding of those traits into my identity on a conscious level. When I'm playing a game I'll find myself identifying with some of the characters I really like. Later on I'll think of those characters when I'm facing a difficult situation and end up invoking them to draw on the characteristic traits that I feel will help me face the situation. By invoking Guan Yu (the Chinese god of detectives and just wars, but also a character in a video game and actual historical personage) for instance, I could draw on his ability to be a commanding presence. This allowed me to enhance my own presence, so that I stood out more and had control of the situation.

I use pop culture entities as masks for my aspects. The character provides a familiar face and enough distance from my own personality that I can observe a particular behavior in the character and find similar points of reference in myself. At that point, I use the character to either enhance the behavior pattern or I can banish the behavior into the character. I then banish the character, removing its energy and sustainment of the behavior from me.

Even though the pop culture character is invoked and acts as an aspect there is always a distance between yourself and the entity. Invocation, even when it involves possession, can also involve keeping some level of awareness of your own consciousness . In the case of the actor Tom Baker, though the persona of Dr. Who had taken over, his core personality was still aware and conscious to some degree.

The most important feature of aspecting is that it allows you to shape your identity through conscious work via invocation of different entities and working with them as aspects of yourself, as you simultaneously call on both the entity and the corresponding part of yourself. The entities serve as references for a personality aspect you create, or you interact with them directly. In a psychological model, you make a conscious choice to understand and work with the personality traits of yourself that exist on a subconscious level and bring them to a conscious awareness so that you can determine how they fit into your life. The best way to do aspecting is to determine first what personality traits you want to work with. Then pick an archetype that resonates with those personality traits. Find out as much information as possible about the specific manifestation of the archetype you work with as well as similar entities (i.e. ones who'd fit the same archetype. As an example Loki and Coyote would both fit the trickster archetype, though in different ways). You may find that one of those entities resonates with you better than your initial choice.

Once you have all the information in hand, it's time to actually work with the entity. Neopagans routinely dress as the deities they invoke during ritual. In fan culture, costumes are used all the time to help the fan become the character s/he wants to be (Lancaster 2001). Therefore you may find costumery to be useful. You might also want other artifacts about the entity on hand, such as pictures, comic books or books on mythology. Also any incense, music, etc. that is associated with the entity is a nice touch. All of these artifacts can help you integrate the identity of the entity into your own identity.

When you treat the entity as a separate being, you'll need to carefully consider how you want this entity to work with you as an aspect. The first invocation is the establishment of the connection you share with the entity and your opportunity to explain what it is you want to do and how you want to do it. You'll want to be respectful, but also firm. You'll work with the entity directly while invoking it, drawing on its personality traits to influence your personality and drawing forth the corresponding parts of yourself. You'll need to identify traits within your personality that correlate with the entity. For instance, if it's a trickster entity, you would want to look at your sense of humor and how it will be impacted by working with the entity. If it's a warrior entity, you might want to examine your current martial skills, or how you handle emotions such as anger, as these can be impacted by the entity. Because you don't want it to have an undue amount of influence over your personality or behavior, you'll have to make sure that the connection can be stopped at any time. I usually choose to link the invocation to a specific object, so that when I want to aspect I can just wear the object and channel the entity into me, while at the same time retaining enough control to actually appreciate the effects of working with the personality traits I want to discover. When I want to stop working with the entity, I take the object off and the invocation ends.

Once I've worked with the entity long enough to get a sense of how its personality traits mesh with my own, I can create an amalgamation of myself and that entity which becomes my personality aspect. Basically I create a splinter personality which embodies specific behavioral traits, which I can use to help me deal with situations where it's needed, but still provide me some distance from the personality trait until I feel ready to integrate it into me fully. I no longer need to call on an external entity to accomplish this goal, because I'm using the personality aspect I've created. For example, instead of calling on Guan Yu to help me enhance my presence, I would call on a personality aspect inside me that took traits from Guan Yu and melded them into my behavior traits which also embody a commanding presence. By being able to call on and visualize a personality trait that embodied myself, but also had some of the skills that I'd previously perceived I didn't have, I could gradually integrate those skills into my psyche, while still providing myself enough internal space to get fully comfortable with those personality traits.

Identity is a fairly flexible concept. It gets shaped and altered all the time. Who you were one moment ago is different from who you are now. But you can consciously shape your identity and it behooves us all to do so, instead of letting our subconscious impulses rule over us. Invocation, in all of its many forms, is one of the ways we change identity. Most people think of invocation as doing that particular function, but they ignore the reality that invocation necessarily involves allowing your personality to be compromised with that of another. The questions are what can we learn from that experience and how will we use it to change our identity to get the most out of it?

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