Hmmmm, this gets me to thinking. Especially given how much more spirits are prone to possessing (benignly or not) people than are essences or daimones....maybe part of the ecstatic thing is that many/most spirits crave human expererience and/or emotion? So part of what you are doing is experiencing the feeling that the spirit wants, which draws it to you. Perhaps part of the negotiating process is actually a sharing of that feeling.
Alternatively, spirit thought is so weird that to deal with them at all, you have to break out of your normal channel of thinking, and that is what all the drinkin and dancin is about.
The latter is closer to what little I've seen written on this. The former is much more evocative, at least for me, however. "Well, if you want to contact the Brother Wolf spirit, you have to have the scent of the hunt on you, the thrill and the hunger need to fill your mind. So you spend all day fasting, and take the herbs that make the world brighter, then the shaman and you ritually stalk the sheep. As you carry on the world falls away, and you are stalking it through the first forest. It is bleeting in terror, and you can feel the great wolf stalking closer. Finally you leap on it and gash its throat and drink deeply of its blood, and as you howl your victory the spirit comes, and enters you to. It wants to gorge on the kill, but you demand that first it give you...." Well, not quite cannonically correct, but much more evocative than "You get stoned enough to think like a wolf, and pass through into the spirit world, into Brother Wolf's demense. There you bargain with him for...."
--bryan
Powered by hypermail