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#tradcraft
deeealchemist · 3 months
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“The only body part we found was one skull and one bit of pelvis, everything else was completely gone," said the park owner.
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elvthron · 8 months
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In Italy the 15th of August is a national holiday, Ferragosto, coming from the pagan festivity of “Feriae Augusti”, when Ottaviano Augusto was proclaimed emperor. Originally the whole month was a holiday, since there were also other festivities during that time (like the Nemoralia, 13th August, in honour of the goddess Diana).
Me and my boyfriend went to the woods to relax a bit and we decided to go a little farther than our usual places, here I stumbled upon glorious meadows full of beautiful plants 🍃💚
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Artemisia vulgaris - my all time favourite ally, my Moon in plant disguise 🌙
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Solanum Nigrum - it was my first time meeting this plant and I’m very excited. That’s why I asked politely if I could take some branches with me and I felt like it was okay to. They’re now on my altar 🩶
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Datura Stramonium - my all time favourite, the one whom I feel so connected to. I’m about 6 feet tall and this one was taller than me! 🥀
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And dwarf elder flowers! They’re so cute (even cuter than ‘normal’ elder flowers) 🌸
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witches-bottle · 3 months
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Circle Work:
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The above circle is taken from the Black Pullet, which contaisn a very good amount of seals. I've seen people actually use this as a seal proper, and I would find it good to be drawn on an altar cloth as a sort of miniature altar. Alternatively, the format can be used to establish an altar itself. The circle seems to have been drawn from a similar one, making use of it for the conjuration of an assumed spirit guarding treasure, as noted here:
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The main differences are the placement of the evocation triangle as well as the circle above being more simplified, as compared to the latter circle which has more ceremonial aspects. It also has the Christogram, the JHS, which is meant to reflect IHS which some interpret as meaning "Jesus" Simply but can also supposedly mean:
Iesus Hominum Salvator: Jesus, Savior of Men In Hoc Salus: In this (The Cross) is Salvation Iesum Habemus Soclum: We have Jesus as our Companion
Though I've also taken to thinking of it as: Isus Hristus Soter: Jesus Christ the Savior
Additionally, the First Circle (Black Pullet) lacks the, what I presume are, candles in the four quarters, as well as provides symbols which seem more planetary in nature than the latter which has no real symbols outside of the Christogram. Both also make use of a fire, which is a common medium for exorcism, cursing and evocation in older grimoires. Additionally, the assistans are outside the triangle of evocation, rather than inside which is found in the latter. The latter has a circle of evocation and we might assume that the circle would be made using some method or another, such as the Circle making use of the MI-CHA-EL or the Trithemian Circle
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One might also consider, at that point, using any of the well-known Pentacles of Solomon for the conjuration of spirits. If the above is used, and in its traditional form, then the fire would be kept aside and the main medium be a crystal or shewstone.
On the point of it being less of a circle and more of a sort of altar set-up, I would find it an interesting experiment to keep the seal of the HGA and the Seal of a Patron Spirit in the two assistant points of the Black Pullet Circle, them representing the powers that aid the magus in their affairs in the spiritual world, alongside protecting the magus in those same affairs.
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Some things I’ve been thinking about. At times being an American trad witch is incredibly frustrating and at others it’s absolutely exhilarating, rewarding. Reconnecting with my ancestral ( primarily french and scottish ) lore, magical practices, witchcraft etc has and will continue to inform my practice but I’ll never be a “french” witch. I’ll never be a “scottish” witch. I can find a lone hawthorn or a sacred tree guarding a hidden spring to tie the cloutie to, I can divine via a snail’s mucus trail, Fly to the Sabbath to meet The Abbess, heed the Dame Blanches, pluck the golden bloom with songs to St Columba, safeguard me and mine via silver, spring water and juniper. Yet there’s many things I’ll never know or be able to do. Whether that’s because these things are so tied to the land or a specific place, language barriers, ( working to overcome this one ) or due to the ( well warranted) gate keeping of lore and practices.
This used to be a source of great confusion for me. I think because I was afraid( due to my previous new age fuckwittery ) to experiment, do anything other than what I understood as “traditional”. My understanding being too rigid at the time; the pendulum swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. This delayed my progress and “froze” me. I was left wondering what an “American” trad craft would look like; most our books do come from a European POV. Learning of our own magical traditions as well as those of my Canadian family ( still working on that one haha ) helped. Reading Robin Kimmere helped. Reading Schulke, him being an American and writing on American plants, helped too. I’ve come to know Sugar Maple and Plantain as powerful spirits. Both teaching important lessons on how to rectify my ancestors mistakes, to foster relations with the First Peoples and how to incorporate the magic of this land into my craft. Rather than being frustrated by my being American I see it as a challenge now. I get to explore spirits, plants, places, animals, spiritual/physical ecologies ( is even really a difference between these?) completely unknown to my ancestors. I get to reconcile the old and the new. To learn from Spirit Direct. Tradition isn’t the worship of ashes, it’s the preservation of Fire. New wood must be added to keep The Fire burning. The Devil of this land certainly is a spirit of the unknown.
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I am the land, the land is me.
I don’t own it, to it I owe all.
To it my body will return, the tithe paid.
I’m not rolling hills of heather, white chalk cliffs, the monk’s island nor the azure coast. The memories of these places echo distantly in my blood, sung alive by my ancestors shades. Part of me they’ll always be; yet it’s not who I am. Not what I am.
I’m craggy shores, dull-jade waves bearing down upon the tired rocks. I am musky pine forests veiled in mist. Sun-venerating oaks hugging the shoreline. Bleeding alders in damp ground swelling. Proud maples sustaining generation upon generation with their boiled blood. Death-grey clay, exposed by running spring.
I am the kudzu, the itching moth, the knotweed, the Norway maple, the ivy wrecking havoc upon the land. My surname and light skin proof of a genocide ongoing. I am my ancestors sins; the specter of the Old Growth forests, their grief hanging over the land like a fog. Every interaction with The Land tinged with sadness, loss.
I am my maternal side’s copper curls. Melusine’s pride. Ave Landry! Ave Gauthier! Forebears mine.
I am my paternal side’s grief. The end result of decades of cultural warfare. The Jesuits stole our name….my hair will not be cut.
Never will I libate these glacier carved valleys with booze.
I am the plantain, learning a kinder way. The sumac reclaiming the orchard.
My Februarys, my Marches aren’t snow drops and daffodils peaking through the frozen ground. They’re steely skies and walls of sleet. Bloodroot heralds winters wane; not Brigid’s flower.
My June isn’t fields of poppies, it’s seas of crimson staghorn blooms skyward reaching.
My augusts aren’t golden shafts of wheat, swaying in summer’s last breaths; they’re explosions of neon-violet and honey-yellow. Corn ripening on the vine, supporting the climbing bean. The cicadas song reverberating.
Old Michaelmas marks harvest’s end, October potatoes long buried in soils darkness finally exhumed. The Devil his Rosy Briar to ascend and plunge.
With Novembers first snows the Dead come in.
I’ll never process around a standing stone nor know what it is to live and eat off the land my dead lay in. Finally, I’m learning to be at peace with this. To love and know the land I live on. I’ll always be a stranger here, a guest. I hope to be a good one.
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saccharinesensuality · 2 months
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Traditional Witchcraft, Vampirism and we who are Succubi/Incubi in human form overlap if you think about it. Witches in many cultures are still seen as inhuman (often demonic) souls with human skin that fly out to drink people's 🩸 or life force. In page 161 of Vampyre Magick, the fangsmith Father Sebastian writes of astral projection as "The Flight Of The Succubus". This is similar to hedge riding in traditional witchcraft, just without the psychedelics of flying ointment.
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artemisian-dragon · 8 months
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New Tumblr but not new to Tumblr. Aiming to focus more on my craft so drop a follow or a heart if any of the following interest you:
Artemis
Apollo
Nyx
Lady of Avalon
Traditional witchcraft
Appalachian folk magic
Dragons
The Good Neighbors
I do also partake in fighting the oppressive system that is the entirety of the US
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thedansemacabres · 4 months
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not to be Cornish but it is genuinely so… awful how people getting into “serious witchcraft/tradcraft” pick up Cornish witchery books without ever knowing where Kernow is on a map. Do they know our culture is struggling? The housing crisis in Kernow? The fact kernow isn’t England? Do they even know that Cornwall speaks Kernowek?
It is simply tiring seeing another “beginner tradcraft reading list” and kernow is tossed in without thought or care.
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brightgnosis · 5 months
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“Wicca Bashing” Round 2: The Double Standard Of Always Shitting On Wicca But Not TradCraft
What ultimately utterly baffles me the most about the community's constant desire to pull down its pants and crap on Wicca, is that Robert Cochrane (Roy Bowers)?
Was also "A White British Man".
Also claimed the exact same "hereditary Witch Cult" nonsense.
Also created his own Witchcraft Tradition.
In the formation of Cochranite TradCraft, Robert Cochrane (Roy Bowers) also appropriated a lot of practices from other traditions and mythos he shouldn't've. And the tradition is, frankly, a hell of a lot more sex-centric within some strains than Wicca ever is- and that sex-centrism is blatantly erotic and hypersexual, rather than Wicca's focus on the fertility of the land via the Gods. He also decided it too requires initiation to enter his Tradition (even if the Initiation mechanisms are different).
Ultimately Cochranite TradCraft shares a lot of similarities of belief and practice to Wicca. And that's thanks to Cochrane literally having (at least) a 1st degree initiation into Wicca and one of its second major contributors being Doreen Valiente (a Wiccan High Priestess).
Not to mention the Traditions that outright do blend both openly and exist in a weird grey spot that's not quite one or the other. Or the open cooperation of people from both traditions to create materials for both- such as Ed Fitch and Joseph Bearwalker working together to create "The Pagan Way" to meet the demands for outsiders to both traditions. Or, like, y'know, Doreen Valiente whose contributions routinely get ignored and swept under the rug because pissing contests over which White British Man is "The Worst Actually" are more important I guess.
And yet TradCraft is always seen as "more legitimate" than Wicca, and gets absolutely none of the same hyper-policing or discussion of "Red Flags" and dangers, skepticism, outright lies made up about it, (Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner co-created Wicca exclusively to groom young hot women into having sex with them? Really? Really ????) etc, that Wicca does. Even despite sharing so many of these very specific similarities of both creator and their creation, structure, and praxis across its own (equally independent) strains of Tradition.
It's almost as if there's a massive double standard and bias in this community about who we police and who we don't ... And once again I have to tell people to pay attention to the crap that lays on their own side of the fence before complaining that their neighbor's yard stinks. Because these problems are not problems with individual groups, but with the community as a whole for a variety of reasons- and it's time to stop assigning all the blame to one singular group and acting like only one of us is "The Worst Actually".
None of us are "The Worst", actually. We all have shit in our own yards to deal with- and a lot of that shit was made by the same group of Dogs howling the same tune at the same damned moon. And we all need to deal with that collectively; this whole "Piss on one another all the time" thing is getting so goddamned old.
Like ... Are y'all not tired of acting like absolutely unnecessarily petulant and petty Toddlers over things, yet? Can you not grow up, stop acting like panicked Evangelist Protestants every 5 seconds, and actually act like the damned adults you're supposed to be, capable of having reasonable discussions already? I know I'm tired. Why aren't the rest of you already?
This is an opinion piece based in 20+ years of experience and research. If you found this helpful or interesting, please consider Tipping or Leaving a Ko-Fi; even $1 helps
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reno-matago · 5 months
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The curse on my neighbor and the spell to keep my colleague away from my outings seem to have worked well. I feel more and more confident.
Paradigm changes regarding my personal Faery are also taking place, with a certain “demonolatry/theistic Satanism/Strigoi” tone, & always Luciferian with Hellenistic polytheism and cult of Antinous.
There is order to put back into my life!
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quietjustice · 3 months
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take care of the spirits and they’ll take care of you. A lot of the trees in my area have been broken and torn by local kids, I went to go harvest some holly leaves today for a protection ritual I’m planning. for the first time in the many years I’ve been working with this particular bush, a freshly fallen branch was lying there, right in my usual offering spot, the wood still green and the leaves still plump.
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blackthornwren · 3 months
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Hello! 2, 6 and 9 for the ask game? 🌹
Hello! 2. Does a particular faith inform your craft, or alternatively, if your faith and magic are separate - why is this distinction between the two important to you? My faith is predominantly built on folklore and superstition - a mix of Scottish (owing to my family's ancestry) and local to where I live, star lore, fairy belief, and what I've been told by Them. The magic is the same, but mainly informed by things conveyed to me in dreams and trances. 6. How easy or difficult has it been for you to hold to a dual faith observance? A little bit of both - there are times where it's easy, there are times when it's difficult. It ebbs and flows. It's one of those things that's hard to explain because on the surface level, it shouldn't make sense - venerating saints and actively working with the fair folk appears impossible. But it takes a lot of time and looking beneath that surface to find that they have more in common than you would think; that there are saints whose lived experiences involved the fair folk and that there are aspects of each that are not so dissimilar. 9. What's something you wish more people understood about the craft?
Keep things closer to the vest. Your practice grows and deepens by leaps and bounds when you're not posting every little detail online for the sake of an audience.
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elvthron · 9 months
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St. John’s night 🧡
🌞 Happy midsummer 🌞
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witches-bottle · 1 year
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Breathing Techniques to Help the Magus
These are just a few techniques I picked up in my years. It includes things that help with energy work but also stuff that just helps in the day-to-day runnings, like the four-fold breath or a breath to help energize the body midway through the afternoon.
The Vase Breath
The vase breath helps in meditative practices because it introduces more oxygen to the system. More air also means the bringing in of more energy into the body. It also just helps when you're walking in a natural area. We often just breathe with our chest and that is good too, this exercise follows the analogy of a vase. When you fill a vase, it starts at the bottom and flows upwards. When you empty it, it goes from the top downwards. So, when breathing, the following pattern is formed:
Breathe into the abdomen and allow it to expand outwards, then moving upwards into the chest and throat. Hold for a few seconds, then slowly release through the chest downwards to the abdomen.
Our dear friend, Jason Miller, provides that the breathing rate should move down from 15 breaths per minute to round about 8.
The Four Fold Breath
My friends during high-school used to do this before exams, it is like a mix between breathing, mindfulness and visualization. They used to call it the Box Breath and the goal was to fill up the box with your breathing. The other method that I learnt was to use your breath to form lines. 4 seconds inhale to form one lines, hold to form the next, exhale for four seconds to form the next line then hold for four seconds to create a little square. This can be done over and over again and the breathing control, the counting and the visualization does well to bring the mind to a state of stillness.
Bedtime Breathing
When the mind is fucked, and busy recuperating from the fucked-upedness of the world around us, we may find it a bit more difficult to fall asleep. This breath helps with that. The pattern is as follows:
Breathe in for four seconds, hold for seven and exhale for eight.
It sounds weirdly difficult when I write it and read it but in practice it does help. I generally like to imagine breathing out the stress of the day as soot and smoke and breathing in something like a soft blue energy to bring my body back into peace mode.
Morning Breathing
This has a similar form to the Kundalini Breath of Fire in a way but this one serves more for raising personal energy in the morning as compared to raising the energy of the Kundalini. The way it is done is to breathe in for six seconds then force the air out in a sharp exhale for two seconds.
Pore Breathing
Which allows the magus to take in energy, or Qi, from their surroundings. It may start off with a simple vase breath but as the magus goes along, they begin to focus on their pores opening, and as they inhale - they bring in the surrounding Qi which they can imagine as soft, soothing golden light that enters into every single one of their pores and infuses with their entire system. This is good for just everyday work but finds its glory when the energy is gathered, directed and sent into something like a talisman. If you desire, you may even go to particular places. Sitting in the moonlight to absorb Lunar Qi, in natural areas to absorb the Qi of the Earth and so on.
Additional Techniques
Something I use to ground myself is to breathe but push all that breathe to the bottom of my body, to where the base of my spine is, rather than bringing it upwards to my head and above it to bring consciousness and energy into a trance state.
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Motivated by a mutual, here’s an ask game!
1 What do you practice?
2 Does a particular faith inform your craft, or alternatively, if your faith and magic are separate- why is this distinction between the two important to you?
3 What paradigm or philosophy do you adhere to?
4 What culture(s) is your magic rooted in?
5 For my dual faith folks, do you practice a historically attested syncretism or one of your own creation?
6 How easy or difficult has it been for you to hold to a dual faith observance?
7 What are some of your favorite tools?
8 What are some of your favorite books, or books you would recommend to a novice?
9 What’s something you wish more people understood about the craft?
10 What’s something you’re tired of explaining to people?
11 How would you define witchcraft?
12 Your favorite things about the occult community? Whether it’s your local community, if you’re lucky enough to have one, an online community or whatever!
13 Least favorite things about the community?
14 Go to herbal allies?
15 What’s something you feel is often overlooked?
16 Books in general you recommend or are interested in?
17 go to animal allies?
18 go to mineral allies?
19 most unorthodox thing you’ve utilized in magic?
20 what’s something you’re currently interested in and/or learning about?
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breath-of-venus · 8 months
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I used to think I was lucky to have been studying magic since 14. In a way, I kinda am. I've covered many basics at that age, but at the same time so much of my way of understanding of magic and its processes shifted that I'm not even sure that was any kind of headstart for me.
If anything, magic seems to have (very) slowly creeped into my life as solid "thing" when I was 18. And even now I still feel very much a newbie, at age 22. The difference is that now this newbie is going places 18 yo newbie-me wasn't, and places 14 yo newbie-me definitely wasn't.
What I'm saying, I think, is that you're gonna get where you're supposed to get when you're supposed to. Perhaps there is no headstart.
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