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maddiviner · 1 year

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How would one perhaps cast a glamourbomb?

Note: This article describes some stuff people did in the past. It’s not safe or wise to do that kind of thing nowadays, if it ever truly was. I don’t recommend engaging in these activities, but wanted to answer this anyways. The word itself made me nostalgic, but conflicted? Yeah.

Glamourbombs, at least as I know the term, aren’t spells in the traditional sense. They are (were, more like) magical performance pieces. They touch the “mundane” world with some sort of occult interjection. This was (perhaps thankfully) most common in places where the veil between “mundane” and “weird” was already thin: libraries, universities after midnight, anime conventions, places like that. While I don’t doubt people still do this today, the trend was at its peak around the turn of the century.

At the time, I was in middle school. As the Millennium (holy f**king s**t! its Y2K!) approached, the apocalypticism wasn’t just limited to the Christian kids. Those of us who weren’t Christian or just came from more secular families still saw things like hysteria about Y2K glitches and especially climate change. A lot of that was pretty scary to us, especially considering some of our more fundamentalist-minded neighbors were saying the world was going to end and “Jesus was coming back.”

It wasn’t so much that we believed them. We just knew, even as kids, that the scientists weren’t lying about the climate data. We also knew that people were acting really irrationally, whatever their reasons. This fit in well with the notion that some big change was coming. Maybe it wasn’t the Christian apocalypse, but could it be something? Plenty of adults seemed to think so, too.

Online, and in our own (burgeoning) occult spaces, we had our own spin on things. Allegedly, by glamourbombing, we were helping, in some small way, to enchant this increasingly hostile mundane world. Because, as teens and tweens growing up on White Wolf, Captain Planet and Square Enix, we clearly knew what was best for reality!

We had every right to (at least try to) impose it on the rest of the world at every chance. Right? Right?

We’d all read at least two books on witchcraft from Barnes and Noble, too.

In some scenarios of glamourbombing, the point was just to make people going about their day pause for a few seconds, think “Hmm? Cool!” and go on about their lives, hopefully in a better mood. These were usually simple things like flyers seeking a “LOST UNICORN,” a notice that you’re entering a “PIXIE-FREE ZONE,” silly things like that. You still see stuff like this today and (if it’s well-designed) it makes people smile and nothing more.

Other glamourbombs had more complexity. They (sometimes) included a bit of magical technique - an active hypersigil, for example.

When pen drives grew in popularity, they became common tools for glamourbombing, with people filling the drives with “magical” material and leaving them (usually conspicuously) somewhere, like a library.

These hypersigils might take the form of experimental music MP3s, animated loops, even actual .EXE files (supposedly). I don’t know whether anyone was bold or foolish enough to click on something like that, of course.

I was barely in my teens, and definitely still sorting things out when it came both to my personal beliefs and perspective on wider community issues like this. Even then, though, I knew not to click any weird .EXE files.

The larger problem, in case you couldn’t tell?

A lot of this straight-up ignores issues like bystander consent from a magical perspective and, y’know, the problems that can arise from leaving weird/unexpected things in public places.

Also? In case you’re not keeping track, I’m talking about the 2000s here. Early 2000s. As in directly after 9/11. Not exactly a wonderful time to be running around acting weird in public and dumping strange packages. Not a safe or wise thing to be doing. Some people got a tag on that early on and quit such shenanigans.

In the summer of 2003, I attended a summer program for “gifted” 🙄 kids where I took the course focused on Greek mythology. The motley pack of metaphysically-inclined nerds I met there thought glamourbombing was tragically cool, of course. We had all kinds of ideas about “Lost Pegasus” flyers and other Greek mythology-themed things. Thankfully nothing that would’ve been too harmful. We ended up being too shy and busy with schoolwork to actually do any of it.

Sadly, later on, there were some attempts by groups (some of which I’d call cult-like) to recruit using this kind of thing. I won’t name anything that’d put me on anyone’s radar (hopefully), but I remember reading about some of it.

One particularly unpleasant and notorious use of this technique occurred on the west coast in the late 2000s when a cult set up an “art installation” in public featuring a live rat in a maze and some other random detritus. The rat didn’t freeze to death despite cold temperatures, thankfully.

Incidents like that (which was, of course, reported as a bomb scare) probably helped to put a stop to the glamourbombing trend. After all, if you’re (supposedly) after some kind of mind-liberating mass reenchantment of reality, well, nothing could be worse than the whole bomb squad showing up, right?

As the digital age crept on, I think people started to reevaluate attention’s role as a commodity. It’s really easy to get attention if you want it, as things like the “rat in a maze” exhibit (which made the papers) show.

You can’t control what kind of attention you’ll get, though, and you can’t say for certain that what you’re doing won’t have unintended consequences for other people. With that in mind, something like glamourbombing doesn’t seem very responsible, especially right now.

I guess the concept isn’t irredeemable. As recently as 2018, I was posting on Facebook looking for someone to help me slay the green dragon that sometimes lands in the field near the Taco Bell by the highway.

Little pranks and jokes like that can brighten everyone’s mood sometimes. There’s certain contexts, though (my Facebook feed, for example) where it might be appropriate, and others where it wouldn’t.

And the full-on concept of a glamourbomb, designed to “spread magic in the mundane'' with an active sigil of some sort, etc? Hard pass. Doesn’t seem ethical to me nowadays.

And, of course, it’s generally a bad idea to do anything that might be mistaken for a bomb threat.

#witchcraft #magic #occult #chaos magic #witch #witchblr #sigil #hypersigil #glamourbomb #early 2000s #eliza.txt #new occult #postmodern #millennium #tw animal neglect #tw bomb

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basicallyanotherwitchesthing · 2 years

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New Occult magazine, Volume 1, Number 3 - Shelbourne Press - 1974

#witches #occult #vintage #magazine #shelbourne #qabalah #tarot #astrology #yoga #spiritualism #mysticism #sorcery #witchcraft #new occult magazine #new occult #shelbourne press #1974

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exoflash · 4 months

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a concerning amount of witchblr will be like "um actually new years was stolen by europeans from the ancient god scroobus mcdoobus" and then you actually try to research scroobus mcdoobus and it turns out he was invented in the 1940s by a conspiracy theorist who powdered every meal with ketamine and thinks that queer people are reincarnated fish

#brightts ramblings #BEFORE I GET ATTACKED: THIS IS NOT AN ANTI-WITCH OR ANTI-PAGAN POST #im just literally begging witchblr and paganblr(?) to study history from proper sources #so you don't accidentally end up repeating misinfo or even outright bigoted info without realizing #you are not immune to propaganda!#this post is specifically ab new agey stuff like starseeds #but a lot of other stuff fits into this as well ie 'blessed be'#for further context i am not a witch or pagan myself but i DO study the occult/occult history #religion #spirituality #history

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nefarrilou · 2 months

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L U N A R N E W Y E A R

━━━━━━━━━━━🏮🧧🏮 ━━━━━━━━━━━

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤCC under the cut

+* Clipping

* Edited to fit the design

* Base Game

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

C r e a t o r s

🐭 @goamazons @magpiesan @kismet-sims @yakfarm @rimings @rustys-cc 🐮 @simandy @dizzyrobinsims @marsmerizing-sims @dallasgirl79 🐯 @vapidsims @ssspringroll @xldsims @dustyrat 🐰 @sixcircles @palacesims4

🐲@sixcircles @zynoox @maye @julhaos @srta-leila @dansimsfantasy @shandir @astya96cc 🐍 @luutzi @wenwem @simbience @1-800-cuupid @ommosims @natalia-auditore 🐴 @daylifesims @marsmerizing-sims 🐐 @sixcircles @wenwem @kotehok @snaitf

🐵 @plantainboat @zeussim @jius-sims @dansimsfantasy @kalino-thesims 🐔 @simandy @asansan3 @maya @zeussim @regina-raven 🐶 @natalia-auditore @myfawnwysimblr @the-daydream-archives @sims-musou @studio-k-creation 🐷 @zao @maya @charonlee @feralpoodles

━━━━━━━━━━━ ˗ˏˋ🧧 ˎˊ˗ ━━━━━━━━━━━

🏮 H a p p y L u n a r N e w Y e a r ! 🏮

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steven-myself · 6 months

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Voodoo- Hamidou Banor by Baldovino Barani for FACTORY Fanzine XXXVI

#rufskin #janet jackson #voodoo #hamidou banor #hamidiu banor #baldovino barani #factory fanzine #new orleans #french quarter #muscle #beauty #vintage #occult #baron samedi

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coinandcandle · 25 days

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Coin's Resources for Research

Here's a list of my personal favorite resources for researching witchcraft, magic, and the occult!

Websites

Sacred Texts - This site is a collection of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Almost all of it is in the English language (translated) and when possible they give the original language (which is quite often)!

Jstor - Home to thousands of scholarly content. While there are limitations to the open and free content on the site, they still have quite a lot to offer! If you can afford the paid version I highly suggest you do so.

Wikipedia - I don't care what your high school lit teacher told you, Wikipedia is a great resource and a wonderful way to find where to start when you're learning a new topic.

Encyclopedia Britannica - A fact-checked online encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and more.

Hoopla - A digital library where you can borrow books, audio books, and more! It's connected to your local library so make sure you get a library card!

Libby - Same situation as Hoopla.

Worldcat - A website that helps you track down reliable sources that you can only find in libraries.

PDFDrive - A website with thousands of free pdfs. It doesn't always have what I'm looking for but it's always worth a shot to check!

Youtube

Esoterica - Run by Dr. Justin Sledge, Esoterica is a channel that discusses the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.

Angela's Symposium - Dr. Angela Puca's channel where she covers peer-reviewed research and scholarship on magic, witches, esoteric traditions, the occult, Paganism, shamanism and related currents.

ReligionForBreakfast - Dr. Andrew M. Henry's channel that discusses--you guessed it--religion! His goal is to improve the public's religious literacy by exploring humanity's beliefs and rituals through an anthropological, sociological, and archaeological lens.

Misc

Ronald Hutton - Hutton is an invaluable resource and a fantastic historian. He writes the facts without being pretentious and is often quite funny too!

Wiki's List of Occult Writers

Wiki's List of Occult Terms

#witchcraft #witchblr #research #witchy research #baby witch #new witch #occult resources #witchy resources

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takofuus · 4 months

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Cheers to a new year in my age collection 🫶

No text version below

#You won't believe how fast I rushed this just so I can post it at midnight #Only for me to pass out the moment the clock hit 12 #Gadamit #cult of the lamb #antiques and the occult #cotl narinder #narinder #narilamb #narinder x lamb #true devotion #a cult leader's logbook #new year #2024

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tarotwise · 2 years

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teejaystumbles · 5 months

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When Dream comes to the New Inn in search of Hob, he is surprised to find his friend looking...quite different from what he has come to expect from Hob Gadling.

#witch!Hob #he's contemplating a new spell #he also writes books about occultism and occasionally gives lectures as an expert on the history of paganism in England #dreamling #the sandman fanart #dream of the endless #hob gadling #teejaystumbles

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postpunkindustrial · 7 months

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#lady cybele #halloween #occult #new age #spoken word

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booknerd693 · 2 months

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#hail satan #satan #satanism #666 satan #occult #satanic #theistic satanism #hail thyself #atheistic satanism #satan is real #actually demonic #satanist #satan worship #new music #dedication #devil worship

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maddiviner · 1 year

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Everyone's already seen this mess from National Geographic, right?

Dang, that's some impressively poor journalism. You can see above that National fucking Geographic still apparently entertains Murray's discredited witch-cult hypothesis from the 1930s.

This screencap is from soon after the article went live, and it's since been amended, of course, after people wrote in to complain. Now it describes the Horned God worshipers as "ancient Celts."

The thing is, the Horned God is a Wiccan concept, though. There's ancient horned deities, of course, but no one central horned figure like in Wicca.

So they're kind of just mixing things around at this point? Oh wow. Please try harder, NatGeo!

#witchblr #witch #wicca #magic #pagan #paganism #occult #history #eliza.txt #eliza reads #press #news #national geographic #news article #horned god #celtic

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basicallyanotherwitchesthing · 5 months

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OCCULT New Dimensions of Life in the Field of Psychic Phenomena - magazine - Popular Library - September 1970

#witches #occultists #occult #vintage #new dimensions of life #psychic phenomena #psychic #popular library #september 1970 #1970

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x-heesy · 22 days

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𝖋𝖆𝖎𝖙𝖍_𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖋𝖋𝖊𝖗

#surrealportrait #surreal #surrealart #surrealism #surreal42 #surrealismartcommunity #popsurrealism #retroart #lowbrowart #weirdart #newcontemporary #lowbrowpopsurrealists @bigbonzo #instaartist #illustration #art #artist #creative #artdesires #arts_gallery #artworld #art_daily #arts_help #artwork #artposts #artistsoninstagram

Moons Out, Goons Out by Warlord Colossus