The Millennium Shrine - How It All Began

There was never any point when I sat down and thought, "I'm going to start worshipping Yami Yuugi, that sounds cool." To be honest, I was pretty resistent to the idea at first; I've never had anything against "pop culture paganism" or whatever you want to call it, but it wasn't really for me. So then how the hell did I end up here?

If you're familiar at all with Yugioh, you probably know the basic premise: Atem seals (part of) his soul into the Millennium Puzzle due to a whole convoluted series of events, Yuugi solves it 3,000 years later, the now-amnesiac spirit within the Puzzle begins essentially haunting Yuugi. In a sense, I seem to have accidentlly re-enacted this. Whoops!

It all goes back to the fall of 2018. I had decided to cosplay Yami for Halloween, and naturally this meant I needed my own Millennium Puzzle. There weren't really any replicas on the market at that time that weren't either a. prohibitively expensive, b. too small or c. lowkey kinda sad-looking lol. I wanted one that was the proper scale, light enough to wear, and as accurate as possible. To that end, I used a screen-accurate (based on DSoD, I believe) papercraft template I found on DeviantArt as a template to make my own custom Millennium Puzzle out of cardboard and craft foam. This was an excessively tedious process that involved cutting out a lot of tiny pieces, but on October 27th, I finally finished it. The photo at the top of this page is the earliest I have- I can't remember what day it was taken, exactly, but it was either the 27th or in the days immediately following, since I was still working on the costume at the time.

That night, I had a somewhat bizarre dream. I was talking to someone- I don't know who, it doesn't really matter- and they were asking me about ancient Egyptian gods. I listed a few, and in the process accidentally said "Atem." I immediately realized my mistake, but the other person went "Oh, I don't know that one, what are they the god of?" Not wanting to embarrass myself by admitting that I'd accidentally said the name of an anime character instead of a real deity, I lied and said "Uh... Friendship, games, and... aromantic asexuals?" and then immediately thought to myself, "Damn! Now that I've said it, that means it's true! Was this your plan all along, Atem?!"

Ok, weird dream, but whatever. Doesn't necessarily mean anything on its own, right? Well, from that point on, I started having a number of weird experiences, including but not limited to:

• Winning a Pokemon TCG tournament for the first time in my life, using a deck I'd named "Mind Crush"
• Finding pieces of the template I used to make the Millennium Puzzle lying around the house, in areas where they shouldn't have been, even after I'd thrown out all the craft mess
• More dreams about Atem, including one in which he tried to teach me the card game (which I was very new to at the time), and another in which he told me I should get bangs (I thought this was a terrible idea at the time but it turns out he was right all along. I do look good with bangs. sorry I doubted you king)

I've had various other experiences with him on and off throughout the years, but that's the long and the short of it. One way or another, I've just sort of accepted that in some capacity, Atem is a presence that exists in my spiritual life. Why? Fuck if I know. Nonetheless, he's here, and he's never done me any harm, so I'm happy to have him around.