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Hey check out 'Sacred Gender' by Ariana Serpentine

Hey so my girlfriend the beautiful and wonderful Ariana Serpentine wrote a book and I wanna tell you about it because she is a very good writer and also my girlfriend and I love her very much

A Cosmology of Trans and Nonbinary Spiritual Identities

Explore gender from a sacred perspective and learn how to turn dysphoria into euphoria. With suggestions for making devotion more inclusive, Ariana Serpentine empowers you to spiritually connect to your gender and incorporate it into your personal and group practice. Sacred Gender invites you to talk to your ancestors through the stars and introduces you to spirits and deities that can help you achieve self-actualization. Learn how to manifest your desires with sigil magic and identify affirming names, pronouns, clothes, and accessories with the smile test. Filled with thought-provoking journal prompts, reflection exercises, and a gender initiation, this beginner-friendly book encourages you to see parts of yourself that may have been obscured and liberate your spirituality from the gender binary.

Buy on Amazon

Buy from Llewellyn

Follow Ariana on fedbook

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Little rituals count too. Stir with intention.

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Listen. You ARE nature. You’re an entire ecosystem. Your flesh sculpted from the dirt. Your blood brewed from rain water. Thousands of creatures living inside of you, on your skin, who wouldn’t be alive without you just like you wouldn’t be either without them. You are born from the forest and the sea. Be kind to yourself.

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I finally got to go to the ocean pretty much on Summer Solstice ❤️

Blessings to Manannán!

Blessings to Áine!

Blessings to the Sun!

☀️🕯🕯🕯☀️

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I also think a really important part of working with omens is outlining for yourself what does count.

Don't just make guidelines for what discredits/discounts potential omens.

Also make guidelines for what validates them! If you're going to make The Powers That Be play frogger with your discrediting hammer, also give them a path to success. Give your omens win conditions.

Your omen is "black oak tree". What counts?

"I accept this omen is true if..."

I see the black oak species of tree referenced in everyday life (*not native to my area)

I see artwork of a black-colored deciduous tree that at least looks like an oak

I have at least 1 serendipitous** encounter where the word/color black and the word/tree oak are both featured

If partial omens are received that I'm unsure about, it will be validated if I also dream about a black oak, or a striking combination of black things combined with oak trees

**serendipitous: strangely fortunate, unusually lucky, surprisingly coincidental

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Friendly reminder to all my witchy and pagan friends and neighbors that Not Everyone Does Witchery The Same Way.

Not everyone will use components or methods or rituals in the same way. Not everyone subscribes to the same beliefs or traditions or even uses of common materials. Not everyone will do the same sorts of magic or consider the same things integral to their craft.

THIS IS NORMAL AND ACCEPTABLE.

No matter how long you've been studying or practicing or what your level of expertise is, you're going to have to accept that other practitioners will do things differently. It doesn't matter if it matches up with what you believe or what you've been taught. And rather than insisting on one's own infallibility or arguing over points of meaningless minutiae, a prudent witch will take the opportunity to learn something.

(Obviously, this does not apply in situations where one encounters bigotry or predatory behavior or misinformation/disinformation that could cause actual harm. But if you're going to argue with someone over whether the particulars of their craft work the way YOU think they should, you're wasting everyone's time.)

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Hey if anybody wants witchy books or powders or charm or spell kits....

My car's AC stopped working. In June. In Virginia. Again. (she's almost 20, it's not her fault) And I have to take kitties to an annual checkup next month.

So. Any proceeds from shop orders are likely going to fixing the car and making sure Havoc and Penny are healthy.

I just restocked a bunch of things and I'm planning more restocks over the weekend. You can use code BRAMBLES for 20% off the new and featured items for the month of June.

(Also if anybody has their own shop and would like to carry my books, I do offer them wholesale!)

Thank you!!!!

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Riders on the Storm by Hbruton

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I think the thing that most Christian atheists who are rebelling against authoritarian Christian backgrounds don't get is why Jews remain Jewish.

Like, I get it, you engaged in your practices because you were told that God would punish you if you didn't, because you're told you're supposed to fear God.

(Incidentally, we don't even use the same language about this. The term that gets translated in most English bibles as "fear" is, like many classical Hebrew words, a lot more multivalent than the English term, and has more of a connotation of "awe." (See, for example, the Gilgamesh dream sequence: "Why am I trembling? No god passed this way." A god is something in whose wake one trembles.) It's what one feels when one is faced with something bigger than oneself, something overwhelming. For some people that may be fear of being harmed. For others it may be wonder or even ecstasy, standing outside oneself.)

But in 2023, Jews have the option (and, indeed, still the cultural pressure) to completely abandon Judaism. Very easily. We can, in fact, do it quite passively. If we're not actively trying to engage with it, it will very much drift away from us.

And it's not fear of divine punishment keeping most of us engaged.

The thing is, if you proved to me tomorrow that God doesn't exist, I'm not sure anything about my life or my practice would change. (I'm already agnostic, so *shrug*. I don't believe in a God-person. Sometimes I believe in a unity to reality, a life and a direction to it. Sometimes I don't. I just don't have the arrogance to think I understand definitively the way the universe does or doesn't work.) I still would celebrate Shabbat, I still wouldn't eat pork, I still would have a mezuzah on my doorway.

I do all that stuff because I'm Jewish, not because I think God will get mad if I don't. I do all that stuff because it's part of a cultural system that I see as wise and life-giving and therapeutic and worth maintaining.

And the thing is, the cultural system that Christian antitheists want us to assimilate into, under the guise of "getting rid of religion", is very much a white Protestant culture. It's not culturally neutral. It has practices, and it has a particular worldview, and it has cultural norms that are just as irrational as any other culture's.

It's also very telling that Christian antitheists purport to be harmed by Jews continuing to be Jewish. Why? We don't impose our norms on anyone else, and we overwhelmingly vote (and organize, and engage in activism) against the imposition of Christian "religious" norms, such as the curtailing of reproductive freedom, blue laws, etc.

So you're only "harmed" by our continued existence in the same way Christians purport to be harmed by it: by claiming that the very existence of a group that doesn't share your worldview and practices is somehow an act of oppression against you.

Which is, you know, white supremacist logic.

You're still upholding the logic of Jesus's genocidal, colonial Great Commission even though you supposedly don't believe in the god that ordered it anymore.

That's gotta be one of the saddest things I encounter among my fellow humans.

You took down all the crosses in the church of your mind and chucked them out the window, but you still refuse to step foot outside the church building, contenting yourself with claiming it's not a church, and firing out the windows at the synagogue and mosque down the road, the same way you used to.

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A lot of people don't know that Robert Graves already wrote popular Greek myth perceptions before PJ - with some has everlasting damages for the worst.

the idea of a Triple Goddesses being universal in every myth? Nope, not a thing; he invented it.

Greece was originally matriarchal before it turned to patriarchy? He didn't invented it, but he popularized it (just look up his White Goddess thesis).

Medusa was actually a goddess and her being raped by Poseidon is a symbol of patriarchy? Also popularized it.

the gods attempt to overthrow Zeus, and Hera, Apollo, Poseidon were punished afterward? Well Graves mixed up a lot of confusing sources into one.

Hestia giving up her Olympian seat to Dionysus? He invented it.

Ares the jock to Hephaestus the nerd? He did that earlier.

Hestia the most kindest and peaceful goddess? He beat you all already.

Hera was forced to marry Zeus and hated the marriage?

Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drawing lots on who get to rule which domain?

Amphitrite being a jealous wife like Hera?

His ideas baby.

And that's not even getting into the other whacky stuff he conjured up.

Edited: some corrections brought on by few people that the casting lots is founded in the Iliad and Apollodorus. I stand corrected!

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Yes, there are ways to confirm the age of an old text without having the original text itself.

I’ve seen people basically claim that it’s impossible to know when, say, certain books of the Bible first emerged because we don’t have the original texts. They often use this to argue for a later date in their composition, often to make the argument that their own favored form of Christianity is the older one.

However, there are ways to know that a text goes back pretty far even if you don’t have the original. I’m going to list a few here:

Quotations and references: If a text is quoted or mentioned in documents you actually can date, then you can be pretty sure that the text existed (at least in some form) prior to these documents.

Language: Language is always changing, and it’s often possible to date the contexts of a text based on the language its author used. If the language in a text is consistent with the time and place it was claimed to have been written in, then that’s probably when and where it was written.

Historical accuracy: If an ancient text accurately describes historical events in detail, then there’s a good chance it was written around the same time as these events; or at least not too long afterward.

Of course there are exceptions. Just because horror writers quoted the Necronomicon, doesn’t mean the Necronomicon was a real grimoire that existed prior to the 20th century. But in this case, the fact that nobody mentions or quotes the Necronomicon before the 20th century (even if just to condemn it), plus the fact that there are no copies of the book that date before the 20th century, nor any old books that contain even parts of the Necronomicon, tell us it’s a 20th century invention.

Someone who is well-studied in an ancient language might be able to fake an ancient text, but once again we can look at what other evidence is or isn’t there. Does anyone throughout history actually quote or mention the book, even if just to argue against it or condemn its ideas? (Remember, Christians spilled a lot of ink to argue against their opponents - just take Irenaeus for one example.)

Someone with access to accurate historical documents might be able to write a passable historical fiction. However, if the book proclaims extraordinary and sensational events that somehow nobody else who lived in the same time and place saw fit to record, that somehow nobody throughout history found interesting enough to cite or mention, then that’s a pretty good indication that the book is a recent fabrication. But yeah, even without the existence of an original text, there are ways we can be reasonably certain that a book dates back to a certain time period.

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do you ever see something and just. get hit with the most visceral and distilled emotions over the nature of humanity

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I have a not easy to Google question about appropriation.

Can someone explain to me like Im 5 why working with a coyote/coyote spirit/coyote symbolism is appropriation?

I understand that the types of coyotes found in the US are specific to here, and that coyote its self is a native word.

But if youre just working with your local flora and fauna and not using native tradition or spritualism how is it still appropriation?

Ive been told that coyotes are 100% off limits no acceptions because they're local to the Americas and native beliefs, and that other continents don't have them at all so they are only specific to native practice. (Which is kind of true but also kind of not true in that other places have animals similar that fill a similar ecological role but also not the point of this post).

But I know of several spells that involve say, tomatoes, or pumpkins which are also native to the Americas and I have never once heard anyone say something similar about things like that.

I like to think that I am open minded, and that I am willing to listen to others when they talk about things that harm their culture, but I just literally don't understand what the difference is here if youre not using native beliefs to begin with, and the last time I tried to ask about it I was told it was absolutely not up for discussion. (And Im not trying to argue I just genuinely dont understand! I dont work with coyotes presently and I never have in my own practice).

So if someone could help me understand why it is still unacceptable even, if you are only working with your local flora and fauna and not using native beliefs and customs, why it is still appropriation I would really appreciate it!

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I have a not easy to Google question about appropriation.

Can someone explain to me like Im 5 why working with a coyote/coyote spirit/coyote symbolism is appropriation?

I understand that the types of coyotes found in the US are specific to here, and that coyote its self is a native word.

But if youre just working with your local flora and fauna and not using native tradition or spritualism how is it still appropriation?

Ive been told that coyotes are 100% off limits no acceptions because they're local to the Americas and native beliefs, and that other continents don't have them at all so they are only specific to native practice. (Which is kind of true but also kind of not true in that other places have animals similar that fill a similar ecological role but also not the point of this post).

But I know of several spells that involve say, tomatoes, or pumpkins which are also native to the Americas and I have never once heard anyone say something similar about things like that.

I like to think that I am open minded, and that I am willing to listen to others when they talk about things that harm their culture, but I just literally don't understand what the difference is here if youre not using native beliefs to begin with, and the last time I tried to ask about it I was told it was absolutely not up for discussion. (And Im not trying to argue I just genuinely dont understand! I dont work with coyotes presently and I never have in my own practice).

So if someone could help me understand why it is still unacceptable even, if you are only working with your local flora and fauna and not using native beliefs and customs, why it is still appropriation I would really appreciate it!

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THANK YOU LUGH <3

I got a tentative job offer (my contact needs to get my offer approved by a committee board, but assuming that goes well then I'm hired!)

@breelandwalker - Thank you for your added offering too!

Cheers to better opportunities!

Dear Lugh,

Please help me find a better job soon. My current job sucks and I doubt I'll last another week...

If you can do this by today, I will dedicate the last of my whiskey to you!

Sincerely,

Allec ⛈️

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Too many people will pass around "always trust your gut!" and "your intuition never lies" content when actually your "intuition" isn't immune to either propaganda, bigotry or trauma reactions. Which is important to be aware of actually

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Dear Lugh,

Please help me find a better job soon. My current job sucks and I doubt I'll last another week...

If you can do this by today, I will dedicate the last of my whiskey to you!

Sincerely,

Allec ⛈️