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Every single year, without fail, we deal with the fact that the internet is obsessed with promoting the misinformation that Ostara must have been stolen from Easter.

People will argue until they’re blue in the face…But they won’t provide citations or evidence to the contrary and the reason why is simple: there isn’t any.

If you find that celebrating Ostara brings you joy: we aren’t here to rain on your parade or stop you in the slightest.

But misinformation, even misinformation that sounds cool and serves to further rhetorical goals, is still wrong and harmful.

So, after years of promising it, we’ve finally delivered: Easter isn’t stolen from Ostara.

Have questions? We’re happy to answer!

Make sure to follow our Instagram @jewitches for the ongoing discussion!

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I don't think I technically have time to make this by Monday afternoon but imma try my goddamned best

#witchblr #journal post #witchcraft #my art

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I’ve seen some posts making this guilt trip of how the people who like to dress up as a sugar skull or the Catrina for halloween or whatever is racist and cultural appropriation.

Nah, it’s completely fine, as long as you are not totally ignorant about it or disrespectful.

Sugar skull represents the deceased, in a joyful manner. And the Catrina is just a social critic which became an icon later on for the day of the dead and Mexico. 

It is not offensive to turn this into a costume or an accessory because it already is, so if you want to dress up like sugar skulls on Halloween, do so, but atleast know it’s value.

Be open minded, don’t even hate, and share this rich culture we have with the rest of humanity, chill.

This post is about that eradicating guilt trip and blaming, and turn it into self awareness

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Reminder: Dia de los Muertos is not Halloween and it is not Samhain. It is separate. It has its own proscribed traditions and cultural importance. If you have a chance to celebrate with your local Mexican community cool! But it is not a neo-pagan or "witchy" accessory to use in Samhain rituals or pagan festivals, or whatever.

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The idea of starseeds is literally a means of recruiting and indoctrinating alienated young people (especially neurodivergent ones) into far right ideologies. First you find things like websites that tell you what planet you’re probably from, then you’re joining communities full of anti-vax and reptilian conspiracy theories, and it’s all downhill from there. Starseeds aren’t some ancient tradition or belief. It’s always been New Age, which has always been racist. If you believe in starseeds at all or just find yourself curious about them, I implore you to research how the New Age movement has appropriated and misrepresented Eastern beliefs and mystical traditions, and how the far right has eaten it up like candy.

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I love when people say the things I think but don't have the experience or knowledge to argue properly. 🤗

My ancestor veneration is pretty low-key, but it's esoteric enough that I have some trouble explaining it to my family: yes I Know great-grandpa was a horrible bigot and awful father, that's why his picture's not on the shelf. What the fuck do you mean that's not fair?

Ancestor veneration research is fun to talk about. I keep wanting to make birth moon phase ... Cards? Like prayer cards, but only for family people I connect with in the stories and photos and records and stuff.

It's so weird to me how people are like "yeah, just do ancestor work/spirit work during Samhain!" as if that's some kind of seasonal thing and not a year-long dedication (if one chooses to) or something that you can just...do. These people have no idea how fucking hard it is to trace your family tree and have no respect for the practices that do practice ancestor veneration year-round. Sincerely, someone trying to trace their family across 2-3 continents and doing as much research as possible into it.

The same thing happens to a lesser extent during Ostara when everyone suddenly remembers that Eostre "exists" and then ignores her for the rest of the year. Like, if y'all are going to get that attached to Bede's fanfiction, please remember her existence more than once a year.

I just...please, masses of witches and Wiccans and pagans and whatnot on Tumblr: be consistent.

#ancestor veneration #my practice notes #reblog

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Some people require that you have a divination in the middle of the spell because you need to confirm that the spell is going to work. So as part of the requirement of spell, you can't skip it. Because you need to confirm with the god or spirit you're working with that this will work as expected.

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Discussion time!!

What do you consider to be the anatomy of a spell? Seems like everyone has their own ideas, with a certain amount of overlap.

As usual the idea here is not to debate over some idea of a definitively correct answer, but to see other perspectives and potentially put more conscious thought into our own practices.

Feel free to just post a link if you've already made a post with your ideas on the subject.

#analogies that i like #yes those are meals

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I love this book with my whole fucking being, I will recommend it until you're dead.

"In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top--the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation--and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as "the younger brothers of Creation." We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn--we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out."

-Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

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I actually use smoke for turbulence, from a fluid dynamics perspective, the density difference between smoke and surrounding air promotes shearing and interesting and chaotic wake dynamics. Sooooo, if chaos is cleansing to you like it can be (sometimes) for me, maybe that. Though I had to walk it kindof far to get there.

Wouldn't put something I wanted 100% clean in smoke, it's literally soot particles.

I am genuinely not attempting to shame anyone for how they do their craft, I'm just hoping someone can explain something to me.

I saw a post on pintrest (it did not link anywhere so no I can't just ask the original creator) that was a little video clip of someone explaining they always cleanse jars prior to use with all of the following, in the following order:

Candle smoke

Moon water

Sea salt

Now, like I said, not shaming anyone who does multi-step cleansing like this prior to casting.

It just seems like over kill to me. I would get it if it were like, cleanse with each of the elements in turn, or here's all these different options for cleansing. I just don't understand the purpose of doing a triple cleanse each time you prep a jar for a spell, and I'd love to learn what the purpose is from anyone who has a similar methodology.

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I made a new divination deck from my Pokemon cards (I do Pokemon tarot and Lenormand)!

Picked cards I liked, tried to do a numerology and Pokemon card art symbolism analysis to create a meanings system. Kind of finished, halfheartedly. Wanted to do readings and got impatient.

Then I figured out a 6vs6 Pokemon card draw system to compare an "idea" (my six cards drawn) against a conflict I'm up against: six cards that represent my opponent, revealed in tantalizing ways, matched up against the six cards I draw. I compare Pokemon type advantages and card HP to decide if my "idea" can compete, and choose a hand of six that means something in particular. I read them like tarot cards or as a pair of Lenormand cards with the complex symbolism of the cards in mind. I drew multiple teams against the same opponent to compare ideas.

OR ANYWAY THATS THE IDEA. I fudged it a bit when I did the last reading, which was fun, but I haven't touched it in a while. Though I found an earbud clamshell case just the right size to fit all the cards inside safely. So at least there's that.

Curious crow wants to know what manner of witching y'all are getting up to recently, or as much as you can disclose. Any fun projects? New avenues of focus? Preexisting avenues of focus??

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Minor stuff really, watering the plants trying to like... Ward with oxygen and happy plants? And overflowing them and making a mess and just like leaving it there and cursing myself with moldy floors and who knows what spice with the unintentional casting. Something minor, maybe related to incontinence, who's to say?

Enough positivity! Tell me the last time you fucked up a magical working real bad! When you accidentally got candle wax in the carpet or left smoke marks on your wall or cursed your family for five years or put a fork in a microwave! Tell me a funny story of fuckups so people realize that failure is an important part of the casting process!

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This story is incredible. And I love it.

daily quest: obtain by any means (including creation) an amulet of Protection Against Ghosts. If you already own such an amulet, you must charge and maintain it.

reward: 50xp, an amulet of Protection Against Ghosts, 5gp

[tooltip: multiplayer NOT ALLOWED for this quest. please do not stack your quest on top of somebody else's]

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This is gonna be a ramble, sec, I've been inspired.

My whole practice is based on what I think about magic and how it works or doesn't/isn't/wasn't I'm still not sure and it doesn't matter, the point is if it does exist I have set of boundary conditions on what I personally bother with making magic make or do for me and how and why it works. I focus on understanding the part that matters to me, because for me and this set of boundary conditions, magic that *matters* to me more, is *easier* for me to do. As is above so below what I do physically that matters more to me is easier for me to do. If I use that parallel, what matters more and is easier is often habit, practiced more, maybe it's essential, or maybe it's interesting.

So I can see that for my magical practice: habit, practicing, interesting, essentials. This is a set of stuff to investigate. Or maybe it's just a road map, I think if it as a landscape reflected in a lake sometimes. It's weird and bendy in ways that it's hard to predict and in ways that the jumps between correspondence and object and meaning in doing magic create entropy in the system and in my model for magic, make it do what it do.

But if I want to make magic happen, in my model, and again, I choose this model entirely because it's what I like and what I think works (if magic works).

I need correspondence like colors and trees and moon phases, not because magic spell book told me, but because those things are interesting to me or essential or whatever in my belief system. But the magic spell book is a resource that I can use if I want a collective consciousness correspondence for something. Fuck if I know where it came from.

(though, many of the colors and *words* I use a lot of etymology in spellcraft, I do find that I can research on Wikipedia logic behind the correspondence, and also quite a lot of perspective on how that correspondence is weird in some historical way)

But I can compare and contrast and research if I like, but I only use shit in magic that *already* had meaning for me. Or stuff I learn about now that *develops* meaning for me. I research that thing that is already meaningful and the correspondences that make sense to me form. As I use them, they evolve in symbolism and their connections to other spell elements (all the stuff involved in petition and pattern making, meaning making, entropy making, magic making actions and inclusions and exclusions).

So I just make it all up, essentially. But that's my model, and I've decided I like it, and that's that. So when I see those big lists and I analyze them and I try to have ideas, I have to make a choice to accept those as part of my interpretation of those things on the list. And it means I have to choose which things I do in a spell I do out of a post or a book, because if I don't understand it, I don't want to do it, I don't know what it is going to do. And if I don't *agree* with the inclusion of a spell element I'm not going to do it. If you say counterclockwise movement means love, I say "nope" and don't do that spell. Most of my interpretations of elements align with others' but the analysis is part of what makes me even sure/feel/assume that I'm doing magic. I need that element of belief to even bother doing this at all, so I only do what aligns with how I believe magic works. So all the bits and bobs get analyzed to death and usually my spells end up being like, "imma write this string of words and think the color green" or "this craft project is *magic*" that's just how it shakes out.

How does this work? How does this technique -work-?

Is a fundamental question that every spell caster should spend time on. Because understanding that, allows you to disregard other aspects of that.

You could say Spell A works because Red vibrates on the Power of the Umbrella Scale. Red is the most "open" of the umbrella scale - so it's a receptive vibration - Red here is not a "color" but rather a vibration. Therefore you must match everything in your spell to the umbrella vibration of Red. Including yourself. So that means you need to hum a specific musical note, while casting.

Spell B which is built on the framework that Strawberries are the essential fruit for all spell casting. You must speak with the strawberries, sacrifice your longest fingernail to the strawberry plant and then pick the strawberry at the right moment (2 days after fingernail clipping) in order to achieve what you want. The clipping must be buried in the proper way in the proper time, so as to not disturb the strawberry plant.

The fact that the strawberry is Red (vibrationally) does not matter to Spell B because the framing and framework is different. Spell B makes no use of the color (ephemeral) of the Strawberry - only the fruit and plant (physical).

Just because Spell B technique (of working with a strawberry) could work in Spell A's framing (assuming the strawberry is indeed, RED, at picking), does not mean Spell A's framework is universal. Because Spell B is doing something else, entirely. Spell A would have to reframe the connection between the Strawberry's "essential fruit status" to the Vibration of Red. Which is adoption / adaption of Spell B to Spell A's technique.

And in my argument, that is a completely, fucking, new spell. :)

#reblog #journal post #witchblr #witchcraft #sorry sec #if youre offended by my agnosticism #but i dont think you would be #ive just been off tumblr a long time and dont want to make enemies like right away #and by enemies i probably do mean anyone being mean to me even a little #asksecularwitch

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I bought myself this cat toy today and it makes crinkle noises and I think it would be really funny to have it in with my Tarot and Lenormand decks and just sort of take it very seriously

#journal post #witchblr #my photography #witchcraft

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Photodump 2022

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August 1st 2021

"There exists some perturbation"

#journal post #my writing #pokemon tarot