alkaloidwitch-blog

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

@amarameera / @aquarian-angel, @eat-the-witch- keepin’ y’all updated on witchcraft-related haircare decisions 👀👀👀👀👀

what do y’all think I could use a braid representing three years of hair growth for?? taglocking obvi, I think I could probably use it for patience/perseverance, I think there’s probably a lot of energy invested in it that I could use for something else almost regardless of what that thing is... I’ll kick the question to Gin and Nick too!

@auburnraindomain replied to your photo

You’re sweet, I’m about to grow one side and the back out too. Its gonna be down to my boobies :P

that’s fucking ideal, I grew out from a weird angled pseudobob thing so the back of my hair is boob-length when I sit up straight and the front hits me at sort of the lower edge of my solar plexus.

I’m gonna buzz the right side definitely (scissors first, so I can save the three-year locks for witchcraft!!), and I’m finally gonna get bangs. I’m pondering whether to buzz the back of my head as well…

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

I think this anon may have been asking for a ‘witchsona’ kinda deal, but oh well- here’s a sampler platter of my witchcraft.

Describe yourself as a witch!

haha okay

I’m a witch of the suburban sprawl, and so I relate less to crystals and plants than I do to metal and concrete; everywhere I go, in every eddy of road-trash and gravel, I find small metal objects- lost and rusted bits of machinery yearning to again be useful- and collect them for my craft.

I’m a crick witch, formerly a bayou witch; I am energetically attuned to the bodies of water wherever I live. The water here is colder and more restless than it ever was in Texas.

Both my home and my workplace are difficult to find without assistance from someone familiar with them. I’ve gotten used to telling people driving me home that they’re going to want to stop at the house right before my house, but to keep going a few yards and they’ll be at my house. Locals wander into my work all the time who tell me they’ve never known we existed, despite having lived here for all their lives, despite us having been a major part of the local art scene for over a decade.

I wear an evil eye pendant sometimes. It’s less a ward for my protection than it is a warning for others’. Losing my good opinion has historically been a bad, bad idea.

My whole life, I’ve been seeing spiritual critters of one sort and another: the dead, minor Gentry, angels and/or demons. They come to me, wanting something they cannot speak to ask me, wanting to give me some message from something too big and too old to tell me itself. They used to terrify me; nowadays I help if I can, tell them to fuck off if I can’t, and if I need to banish something that won’t leave I turn on music with a beat and dance them out.

My mother has more than once heard what she perceived as the voice of God speaking to her while in emotional turmoil; her grandmother was quite openly a witch. I have inherited their religiosity (if not their religion) and openness to the ecstatic, the visionary, the more and less and other than real. I’ve had religious visions of my own, left my physical body for parts unknown and fantastic, and once or twice have been visited by the recently dead.

I’ve never been stung by a bee. I like them, and they seem to like me; we have always coexisted, closely, and very calmly. On the other hand, I’ve been stung by three wasps in my life, two of them dead. I admire and fear them. (Unfortunately, it’s very hard to find occult jewelry or idols celebrating insects of the suborder Apocrita.)

I’m an active magical theorist, always making new symbolic systems to represent magic and researching novel spell paradigms. My pet project is something I’m calling ‘rust witchcraft’, which conceptualizes magic as a chiefly semiotic phenomenon, and which analogizes the relation between meaning and material to rust that has accrued on metal over its history.

There’s something a little bardic, a little skald-like about me; words have power, and I’ve got a gift with them. My poetry, song, rhetoric are stirring, my performances literally spellbinding. My coven calls on me when they need a liturgy written.

Maybe I just watch other people more closely than is usual, but I’ve always known more about other people’s emotions and relationships and attitudes than my peers- more, perhaps, than they’d rather I know. Bored at school, I made a game of guessing what my teachers would say next- some days I could get fully a paragraph out without error. Most of what I learn I keep to myself; I’d like to think I don’t spread gossip without call. I do feel a certain responsibility to share when I observe a beautiful facet of someone’s soul, hidden from others and maybe even themself. Compliments are an art, and they’re no good if they aren’t perfectly sincere.

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

leaving this on my non-witch blog seemed kinda chickenshit, so here I am nailing these 95 Theses to my own front door.

I’d love to talk to you about any of this, but I would not love to have it start out feeling like a fight.

tell us more about witchcraft tumblr

oh boy. follow @alkaloidwitch​ for my unironic witchcraft opinions. I’m a witch! and a materialist with a background in empiricism/scientism, also a materialist in the marxist dialectical sense! you can be all of those things at the cost of your popularity among idealist witches, non-witch materialists, and most of all:

Normies.

my materialism and my witchcraft both grow out of madness; human beings are computers complex enough to perceive things that are not real. For things I know to be real, there is materialism; for things I know to be chimerical, there is witchcraft. as the chaos magicians, wankers that they are, put it: belief is a tool. believing something now may serve a purpose, even if you do not intend to continue believing it later. Playing make-believe with my literal demons now will help me try to make sense of the material world better later.

And it is imaginative play, much as it is deadly serious; much of what we do in life is imaginative play of some kind. let’s pretend there’s a thing called money and let’s pretend it belongs to this specific kind of paper, these specific bits of metal. let’s pretend a corporation is a person. let’s pretend sex is simple; no, let’s pretend sex and gender are different; no, let’s pretend to stop believing in gender and start pretending to believe in ungendered sex.

materialism, again, is the resolution. imaginative play doesn’t have to be bad, but things that are only imaginary play by certain rules; we learn them as children. so when your imaginative play, witchcraft, seeps into your view of the world (as it must), other people calling themselves witches are sometimes going to believe or imagine mutually-contradicting things; the politest way to resolve an imaginary conflict is to come up with some imaginary solution, the more minimal the possible, and stop talking about that because it’s gonna harsh yr witchcraft to get snippy.

entirely different things happen when people come, materially, into conflict. and witch tumblr frustrates me a lot because my tacit acknowledgement that

“none of this is real like rocks are real, so when your imaginary collides with the material world, the material world is always going to trump. if it is materially bad, I don’t care that your imaginary justifies it, and if it is entirely immaterial there’s no point arguing about it”

…is not super popular with tumblr witches. there’s lots of, like, arguments and discourse and positivity posts about the wildest shit.

a three-screens-of-scroll witch tumblr textpost: positivity post for lazy witches! uwu // • positivity for lazy witches who [emoji-capped bullet points all the way down]me: it’s so inspiring that lazy witches can be positive despite the incredible scrutiny and terrible hardships the morning people witches subject them to, ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌟

so, like, I don’t have the same reaction to the idea of demon apologia that OP did. thinking highly of demons just isn’t that uncommon in my circles. to me, that post’s fucking ridiculous because why would you ever bother making it? if you wanna work with demons, do it, but like… other people don’t like demons, and make their own witchblr posts from that perspective, and you can resolve that conflict by just ignoring the imaginary content that is not meant for you.

a clarifying example is in order.

‘don’t use sigils you find on the internet, anyone can upload a curse and say it’s a different spell!!’

my guy. that is so far from being anybody’s real, substantive problem. you would never know unless they told you. their imaginary isn’t accessible to you and you can ignore it. if someone tells you they made a sigil you used to be a curse, and you feel like you have indeed been cursed, that’s still an event internal to you. and after all, someone could lie and tell you their beneficial sigil was actually a curse after you’ve already used it, just to fuck with you.

I can’t get this level of panicked about that level of made-up problem! if the idea of curses hidden in graphics created by random Internet denizens appealed to me, I’d engage with it on my own and not waste time trying to convince other people they should care about my niche paranoia.

the thing is, cultural appropriation is way less imaginary than witchcraft. there’s a real, economic impact to the mass-production in the West of symbols indigenous to ‘exotic’ colonies. there is a real dehumanization involved in treating someone’s proudest and most mundane garments, alike, as being a gaudy costume purchasable cheaply from any two-bit metaphysical store.

(privilege claim for the next bit: I’m a white, American settler-colonialist. that’s a me. I’m a that.)

and on the subject of metaphysical stores…

… run by white settler-colonialists who claim to have spirit animals and have no sense that there might be something inappropriate about shopping for toys in the cultures and religious practices of living indigenous populations whose homeland we are still occupying by force, whose access to their own cultural history we are still actively sabotaging, to sell bastardized sweatshop lookalikes whose significance is less than half-remembered and wholly stripped of context to other white settler-colonialists

there’s endless newb questions in this form:

Q: “can I use this color candle to mean this thing?”A: “I don’t care?”[a reblog insisting that actually they CAN’T use that color candle to mean this thing is the version that went viral]

, which indicates extreme hesitancy to break the rules of the imaginary.

on the other hand, witch tumblr is actively resistant to any demonstrable criticism. these same people fretting about candle colors also throw bizarre tantrums mocking the concept that they should stop cleansing with smoke from white sage, a critically endangered sacred herb that isn’t farmed, and how dare you say they shouldn’t call their white ass waving burning herbs in the air on occupied land ‘smudging’.

no-one cares if you think about the candle differently; stop asking for our input on that shit, because you don’t need it and we have better things to do. on the other hand, people very much do care if you engage in the alt religious scene’s rampant bigotry, but you don’t wanna listen to us on that. those priorities are fucked.

also witch communities have long, long memories, and some things happen again and again. a sampling:

the annoying

‘fluffy bunnies’ who read one barely-researched pop-Wicca text and are here to tell non-Wiccan witches what they’re doing wrong.

relatedly, ‘curse-shaming’, a practice in which even ‘respectable’ Wiccans participate, is genuinely aggravating if you’re at all into, like, historical witchcraft, because for a very long time (Wicca under that name had no public presence before 1954) there’s been not much more traditional for a witch than a curse.

arguments about “male witches” (that no-one acknowledges arose out of transmisogynistic practices in Dianic Wicca, and not really in reaction to men).

‘the Burning Times’ (not real, any historical events embarrassingly misrepresented).

“Easter is a pagan holiday;” relatedly, “Easter is Eostre is Ishtar”.

“Christmas is a pagan holiday.”

the ugly

an entire alt-history of Europe and European magical practice in which Jewish people play no perceptible part.

neo-Nazi physiognomies being passed around as “correspondence charts”.

every reputable resource on Norse mythology, Heathenry, or Asatru has an explicit public disavowal of Nazis, for very good reasons.

anti-Black propaganda, dated to the sixteenth century, about Afro-Carribbean syncretist esoteric/religious practices being repeated with all explicit reference to race left out on Tumbler Dot Com in 2017.

gentiles doing Kabbalah.

an all-white vision of the Hellenistic Mediterranean.

that one girl who stole black people’s bones from burst/eroded graves in a Louisiana graveyard and posted about it on Tumblr (one of witchblr’s few big mainstream crossover posts), leading to her arrest.

the (mostly) harmlessly bizarre

god-marriage

god-phones

what is a familiar really? (& relatedly: sex with spirits. EXTREMELY traditional, by the way),

etsy shops where you can buy custom spirits (NOT as in alcohol),

chemically-treated quartz named as if it was a real mineral,

“correspondence charts” broken alphabetically into individual readmore posts listing the magical properties of various objects (with a reblog later on in the chain complaining that people need to be more obsessed with pointless minutiae)

minors-only witchcraft discord server drama that you’re actively, unsuccessfully trying to avoid learning about

looking for witchcraft podcasts that aren’t run entirely by dudes

“my dog is horrifyingly sick, what spell should I cast?”//”GO TO THE VET”

a wealth of incredibly shitty and boring and unreadable esoteric PDFs by snake-oil salesmen

skyclad discourse

my tarot cards just read me for filth

thirty-year-old woman who should know better by now: christian witch is an oxymoron

christian witchblr: the Law of Attraction is just the prosperity gospel for Democrats

someone’s angry about the existence of secular witchcraft again

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

today I thought to check on a stash of rusted metal rods I’ve been aware of for awhile outside an abandoned office building downtown and realized delightedly that I had my backpack on, which is big enough to comfortably carry the most portable piece. I realized, though, that it had to stick point-up through the zipper-gap, and that seemed dangerous so I went looking for something to peace-bond it with- I ended up putting a water bottle I found in the third recycling can I searched (with permission) over the pointed end.

… is a strong candidate for the most personally-identifiable anecdote I’ve ever told

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

Praying Mantis in Amber (Hymenaea protera, Oligocene) - Dominican Republic

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

the Dynamic, witches edition

sweaterboy, standing at a cautious out-of-angle distance: don't they say never to stand between two mirrors

absolute nightmare, grinning at every reflected copy of themself: they DO say that, don't they?

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

I almost stepped on this little dead bird and bee on my way back from the microscope today and I screamed out of surprise a lot and all the new students stared at me.

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

i was just reading about the ploutonion at hierapolis which is a temple dedicated to pluto in turkey built on top of a cave full of carbon dioxide that kills anything that gets close enough to breathe it and it said that the galli who were trans priestesses of cybele used to crawl through the cave holding their breath and miraculously emerge unscathed and im losing it at how fucking metal that is

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

I don’t observe any wheel of the year except in that I go to/participate in/sometimes write for my friends’ observations when they do a social thing around it, but the solstices do matter to me- Midsummer a celebration of glory, Midwinter a promise of its return- and this Midsummer’s been kinda weird/flat. I think I’ve been inside too much- maybe I’ll grab a notebook and write outside?

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

oh neat, I wasn’t expecting this to strike a chord with anyone. uhh I’m going to bed soon and can’t launch the actual in-depth research I’d need to do to back up these claims, but an outline of relevant points...

anyone can be a witch- the historical records make that very clear- but “witch” is still a strongly feminine-gendered word. anyone can be a nurse, too, but when people specify men who are nurses as “male nurses” that tells you something about what gendered content society attributes to “nurse.”

Western occultisms have, traditionally, been divided along strongly gendered lines. many of the ‘high’ or ‘ceremonial’ or ‘science-y’ occult systems were developed by and between men, and implicitly or explicitly contrasted against the ‘unscientific,’ feminine-coded magic of witchcraft. 

there are traditions- I’m thinking of Norse witch-lore- where the men who do practice witchcraft are explicitly connected to homoeroticism and effeminacy (yes, gender and sexuality are distinct, but almost anywhere it’s a fool’s errand to draw a clean cultural line dividing them).

European witchcraft (at least) is heavily tied up in gender subversion. I go into this in detail (warning: griping about Wicca behind the link) in this post, but the link between ‘fertility’ of the land and reproductive fertility is cross-culturally very common, and divine figures and rituals of fertility often have a lot to say about the culture’s ideals about the relationships between men and women. what’s one of the most archetypical powers of the witch in European traditions? blighting. the witch can damage the yield of one’s crops, one’s livestock, make people barren; she has sex with the devil (often of the sort that would be scandalous even with a mortal), she nurses imps at her forever-after cold and unmotherly tit; the witch is, in many ways, an anti-fertility figure.

in that same post I go into the very, very common phenomenon of third-gendered cultural figures associated with uncanny perception, the supernatural, religious roles, and so on. to claim witchcraft is gender-neutral is to miss the subtler undercurrent within witch-lore that witchcraft involves complexity, ambiguity, and transgression of gender.

spoilers for my thesis: if we keep a grip on our moral compasses and our intellectual integrity, we can shut TERFs and other bigots out of our communities and discussions, affirm witchcraft itself as accessible to everyone regardless of gender or gender history (like it’s been for millenia), and acknowledge the complex relationship of witchcraft to gender ideologies historical and modern, all at the same time.

one of these days I’m gonna dig up research and citations and write a whole goddamn thesis to back up my profound irritation with people phrasing “anyone can be a witch, regardless of gender” as “witchcraft is gender neutral.”

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

one of these days I’m gonna dig up research and citations and write a whole goddamn thesis to back up my profound irritation with people phrasing “anyone can be a witch, regardless of gender” as “witchcraft is gender neutral.”

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!”

― Terry Pratchett,

The Wee Free Men

(via

gatheringbones

)

This quote right here, which I read years before I read one of his novels literally and I say this with no poetic liberty, saved my life. I repeat it to myself constantly to this day.

(via steppeghost)

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

okay I just unfollowed someone over this but

see this? this chart with elemental correspondences for hair color?

this is racist. not a little racist! a lot racist. really, really obviously racist. world war II did not start because blondes are just so smart and I really feel like I don’t need to explain why asserting that, as well as basically everything else in this chart, is incredibly fucked up. there’s like zero chance the person who made this isn’t a neo-Nazi. what the fuck? what the fuck? what the fuck

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

making some sun-infused oil (again)

I’m gonna let it sit in a sunny spot for six weeks this time. the herbs with which I’m infusing the oil are about half lavender by volume, the other half made up of rosehips, rose petals, peppermint, rosemary, fennel, and one star of anise. My worry is that the licorice will overpower everything else, but I’m excited for this! Seems like a good tool for enchanting shit, making wards, cleansing, and just in general smelling good

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

also I always worry about using the term “metaphor” and being misunderstood, like... the alphabet as a concept is a metaphor for thinking about the sound-structure of speech, useful and limited as metaphors generally are. that doesn’t make it un-real, although it’s not real like rocks are real, and it doesn’t make it silly or without merit.

[alkaloidwitch-blog]

not to shit on tumblr p0ly7h31sts, with whom I have no beef, but speaking as someone who’s dabbled in personal theogony there are very few approaches to the metaphor/paradigm of deity that bore me more