(oops - sorry, can you delete the other version of this comment with the editing error?)
Are there general principles about how to navigate the inflection that the egregors of the groups that a devotional representation's artist came from might give to devotional practices? This reminds me of that discussion the other week (I can't find it now?) about how intermediate-planar human constructions like symbols and ideas can facilitate contact from higher planes, but can also distort or color that contact in ways that might go unnoticed. I suppose furries are not clearly more dysfunctional or corrupt than the mainstream culture, especially depending on what you emphasize or de-emphasize; arguably there would be more issues with Christian devotional artwork from people only a few degrees removed from the Holy Land Crusades or the Albigensian democide. And one of the benefits of diversity is highlighting things for reflection by contrast. And having a blurry line between artistic practice developed for devotional artistic subjects versus erotic ones didn't seem to slow the Greeks down much. And the divine inspires and invests its presence in what it will.
This also reminds me that I had been considering somehow acquiring an image for devotions to Whoever it is whose will is conveyed by the details of the tricksy situation around Psalm 22 and the Crucifixion (Mt 27:35,39,46; Mk 15:23,29,33; Lk 23:34; Jn 19:24) and our limited access to surviving manuscripts, with like four different parallel or simultaneous versions of what is going on with Jesus's hands and feet depending on how the broken Hebrew ka'ari yaday weraglay (Masoretic) or kaaru yaday weraglay (Dead Sea Scrolls) or ōryxan cheiras mou kai podas mou (Seuptuagint) is rendered: one where his hands and feet are literally like a lion, one where there are gouges accompanied by tiny archaeologist's surveying posts and ropes or a tiny plow indicating that some kind of furrowing or layer-breaching excavation had been performed, and so on to catch various other plausible proposals for what the text had been, or what the divine intention for how we were to interpret the situation had otherwise been. (And maybe also where all this was happening to some other crucifixion victim, and Jesus was somewhere else, only getting lots cast for his clothes and having onlookers shake their head at him and invoking the first line of the psalm, but without having anything retrospective-prophecy-fulfilling happen to his own hands and feet -- I wasn't really clear until now on the fact that Ps 22:16/17 isn't actually itself referenced by those Gospel texts which survived.) But I'm quite at a loss as to how to find someone artistically competent who could treat the artistic subject of the facially absurd situation with adequate gravity and respect. (Maybe a properly devoted Discordian?) It feels vaguely like it would be a profanation somehow if I were to attempt it myself; perhaps that is what I would need to work on? And maybe artistic competence is of only peripheral importance here? Are you supposed to only make devotional representations using tools that you carefully never use for anything potentially profane, and maybe also consecrated ones just to be sure? There's also the issue about the subject being someone being executed in a torturous way, which seems hard to have appropriate attitudes about just by itself.
(there is an inconveniently ready joke answer here, which would be, "if someone has basically a lion for their hands and feet that's a theriomorphism, so commission Kyoht -- obviously!". though that does not necessarily do any better on the "profanation" front, also I don't know them but I expect most working artists wouldn't appreciate the grief)
Re: Astrology?
Are there general principles about how to navigate the inflection that the egregors of the groups that a devotional representation's artist came from might give to devotional practices? This reminds me of that discussion the other week (I can't find it now?) about how intermediate-planar human constructions like symbols and ideas can facilitate contact from higher planes, but can also distort or color that contact in ways that might go unnoticed. I suppose furries are not clearly more dysfunctional or corrupt than the mainstream culture, especially depending on what you emphasize or de-emphasize; arguably there would be more issues with Christian devotional artwork from people only a few degrees removed from the Holy Land Crusades or the Albigensian democide. And one of the benefits of diversity is highlighting things for reflection by contrast. And having a blurry line between artistic practice developed for devotional artistic subjects versus erotic ones didn't seem to slow the Greeks down much. And the divine inspires and invests its presence in what it will.
This also reminds me that I had been considering somehow acquiring an image for devotions to Whoever it is whose will is conveyed by the details of the tricksy situation around Psalm 22 and the Crucifixion (Mt 27:35,39,46; Mk 15:23,29,33; Lk 23:34; Jn 19:24) and our limited access to surviving manuscripts, with like four different parallel or simultaneous versions of what is going on with Jesus's hands and feet depending on how the broken Hebrew ka'ari yaday weraglay (Masoretic) or kaaru yaday weraglay (Dead Sea Scrolls) or ōryxan cheiras mou kai podas mou (Seuptuagint) is rendered: one where his hands and feet are literally like a lion, one where there are gouges accompanied by tiny archaeologist's surveying posts and ropes or a tiny plow indicating that some kind of furrowing or layer-breaching excavation had been performed, and so on to catch various other plausible proposals for what the text had been, or what the divine intention for how we were to interpret the situation had otherwise been. (And maybe also where all this was happening to some other crucifixion victim, and Jesus was somewhere else, only getting lots cast for his clothes and having onlookers shake their head at him and invoking the first line of the psalm, but without having anything retrospective-prophecy-fulfilling happen to his own hands and feet -- I wasn't really clear until now on the fact that Ps 22:16/17 isn't actually itself referenced by those Gospel texts which survived.) But I'm quite at a loss as to how to find someone artistically competent who could treat the artistic subject of the facially absurd situation with adequate gravity and respect. (Maybe a properly devoted Discordian?) It feels vaguely like it would be a profanation somehow if I were to attempt it myself; perhaps that is what I would need to work on? And maybe artistic competence is of only peripheral importance here? Are you supposed to only make devotional representations using tools that you carefully never use for anything potentially profane, and maybe also consecrated ones just to be sure? There's also the issue about the subject being someone being executed in a torturous way, which seems hard to have appropriate attitudes about just by itself.
(there is an inconveniently ready joke answer here, which would be, "if someone has basically a lion for their hands and feet that's a theriomorphism, so commission Kyoht -- obviously!". though that does not necessarily do any better on the "profanation" front, also I don't know them but I expect most working artists wouldn't appreciate the grief)