buriedpentacles

[buriedpentacles]

HEALTH AND SAFETY PSA FOR ALL MY WITCH/PAGAN/SPIRITUAL FOLKS OUT THERE

Hey y’all. So I’ve seen a few posts across a few different platforms from fellow witches/pagans about finding dead/sick/dying birds in their area and I just wanted to remind everyone: DO NOT TOUCH DEAD OR DYING BIRDS.

Trust me, I understand wanting to provide comfort to them in their last moments or giving them burials, but it is very dangerous to touch ANY dead animal, but especially so with the rise of H5N1 (aka Avian Influenza) in wild bird populations. I went to college for Animal Health Sciences and let me tell y’all, H5N1 isn’t something y’all want to risk. H5N1 is HIGHLY PATHOGENIC and has a fatality risk of around 54% according to the CDC. While cases of animal to human transmission are uncommon, and human to human extremely rare, H5N1 can survive on plastic surfaces for about 26 hours and 4.5 hours on human skin, meaning that you could pass the disease onto your pets, livestock, or autoimmune compromised people around you.

I’m not making this to scare anyone, that’s never my intention. While dead birds are signifiers of various things in various cultural beliefs, please err on the side of caution and keep your distance. If you are seeing an increase of sick or dead birds in your area, please consider contacting your local wildlife authority and reporting it.

Stay safe 💙 I’m going to link a resource on H5N1 from the Canadian Government website, but I highly suggest checking your own government website for more localized information and resources about H5N1. But the resource I’m linking is worth a read.

[buriedpentacles]

June ask game:

9) Do you find sensory engagement or deprivation more helpful in your magic?

Hii!! Thank you for the question!

I definitely think working with the senses are an important part of my practice.

I enjoy engaging particular senses one at a time and depriving the others: I mainly focus on touch, vision and hearing.

I've done a lot of mindfulness practices which focus on the senses, and so I find it very grounding.

I really like to go out into the woods (or even just my garden) and really focus on what I can feel - the soil, the plants, the breeze - as a way to centre myself and find Mother Earth around me.

[buriedpentacles]

Friendly reminder to any practitioners who have pets: certain herbs, and all essential oils/incense can be toxic/harmful to pets through both consumption and inhalation of smoke.

Essentially all smoke, both from incense and herbs, can be irritating to your pets lungs, especially if they are smaller in size. Brachycephalic (or smushed face) dog breeds are particularly susceptible to respiratory issues, such as infection and trouble breathing. Birds are also incredibly vulnerable when it comes to smoke inhalation, and can be fatal in many cases.

This goes for a lot of herbs that are used in spell work too. Many plants/herbs can cause toxicosis in animals. Cats are particularly vulnerable because their livers are less efficient at breaking down certain toxins compared to other animals.

All this to say, if you have pets, research the herbs you’re using and double check if they are safe for pet consumption. This is important even if you don’t intend to feed them the plant in question. If you let your pet into your workspace, accidental ingestion is always a possibility and in case of emergency it’s helpful for your vet to know what potential toxins they were exposed to.

When it comes to incense or burning stuff for your spells, do your best to keep your pets out of your workspace, leave the windows open and make sure the air is clear when you’re done. If you don’t have the space to safely burn incense, don’t. There are plenty of other ways to cleanse your space.

If you have any other safety tidbits for practicing magic/spiritual practices around pets, feel free to add them below 💙

[buriedpentacles]

Let me make one thing abundantly clear. If you:

are a folkist, volkist, odinist, nazi or any other type of racist,

are a TERF, radfem, tradwife, or any other form of transphobic “feminist”,

exclude people out of the queer community (like trans, aro/ace, or bi/pan people)

exclude people out of the witch community (like trans, men, or Christian witches),

You are not welcome here. May your speech dry up and your communities turn to dust and crumble.

I will not be pulled into any “discussion” or “discourse” (I don’t have the will or the patience, I am not Bree). I said what I said, if you do not agree, make it easier on yourself and block me. If you do try to debate with me or try to tell me your stupid views and opinions, you will be blocked and deleted.

[buriedpentacles]

burning food is an inherited trait

[buriedpentacles]

I've been admiring your blog, from the color palette(amazing) to the content(wonderful!) and noticed you have studied ethology? That is so cool, it's my area of work and study too and it's so nice to see another ethologist witch! I hope you have a fantastic week 💚🌿

Hiii!!! Thank you so much!!!

Yes - my degree title is actually Zoology with Animal Behaviour; I've always been fascinated with behaviour, especially how animals interact across species and with their environment!! It actually plays into my craft quite a bit!!!

I hope you have an amazing week 💚💚

[buriedpentacles]

ecological problems of colonialism also have more to do with the exploitative nature of colonialism than with foreigners lacking an elf-like connection to the land imo

[buriedpentacles]

[buriedpentacles]

"So this practice isn't actually closed-"

Ma'am, I am a white middle-class american. The least I can do right now is approach another culture's practice with nuance and respect by not fucking doing it?

I'd be much happier getting to the pearly gates and discovering there was all this magic I could do, but didn't, out of respect, as opposed to learning I was disrespectful of a culture and its history because someone on the internet told me it was fine.

[buriedpentacles]

[E]very [interspecies] meeting in fact reminds us that the being we meet is and always shall be strange to us […]. When beings meet there is a distance between, such that in encountering the slug we also encounter something beyond the slug – a multitude of life we cannot sense. [...] So despite shared histories and the close proximity in which slugs and [humans] live, the slug retains a certain darkness as a creature apart; something is held in reserve […]. And so fleeting awareness of the irretrievability of the lives of others intensifies poignancy, such that despite a gulf separating the [human] from other creatures, some connection, however fleeting, is made to something – however strange. Refusing to dismiss the everyday and the banal is an ethical response. […] Slugs are there: sliming, chomping, and oozing around quietly and that should be enough to give them consideration.

[Text by: Franklin Ginn. “Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Volume 39, Issue 4. 2013. Bold emphasis added by me.]

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So, can an insect speak? And if yes, do we understand it? Wittgenstein maintained that ‘if a lion could speak we would not understand him’, by which he implied that we do not share the ‘form of lion-life’ that would make lion language fully transparent to us […]. A similar insight was [...] expressed by [...] [a twentieth-century] honeybee researcher [...]: Beyond the appreciable facts of their life we know but little of the bees. And the closer our acquaintance becomes, the nearer is our ignorance brought to us of the depths of their real existence. But such ignorance is better than the other kind, which is unconscious and satisfied.

[Text by: Eileen Crist. “Can an Insect Speak?: The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language.” Social Studies of Science, Volume 34, Issue 1. 2004. Bold emphasis added.]

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Animal studies scholarship tends to emphasize animal-human relations, encounters, and similarities. […] Jellyfish and other gelatinous creatures [...], however, float at the far reaches of our ability to construct sturdy interspecies connections [...]. Uexkull’s theory […] insists upon multiple worlds […], a capacious admission that a multitude of other creatures dwell as part of worlds that humans cannot readily or completely access or grasp. Three-quarters of a century later Terry Tempest Williams wonders what it would be like to be a jellyfish. […] [She] writes: “Perhaps this is what moves me most about jellies – their sensory intelligence […] the great hunger that is sent outward through the feathery reach of their tentacles. Imagine the information sought and returned.”

[Text by: Stacy Alaimo. “Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of the Sensible”. In: Thinking with Water. 2013. Bold emphasis added.]

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Although we cannot ‘speak’ with nonhumans in any straightforward way, what we can and more importantly do do is become articulate with them in various ways. [...] If there is a way out of this historical impasse [alienation, climate crisis, global ecological degradation], [for some] it is not to be found in attributing some of ‘our’ qualities to ‘them’. It “would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals […]. Perhaps the task is not to seek to compare the dance language of bees […] with human language, the ‘intelligence’ […] of Monarch butterflies with human intelligence, […] but rather (or at least in addition) to find a way of thinking about these ‘remarkable things’ that grants them positive ontological difference in their own right. […] [It] is concerned with what is always a multitude of others rather than a singular other […]; and it is radically nonanthropocentric […].

[Text by: Nick Bingham. “Bees, Butterflies, and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Volume 38, Issue 3. 2006. Bold emphasis added.]

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Starfish may seem to be still, but longer attention [...] shows them [slowly] moving, changing. [...] Then there are beings [like some insects] that experience hundreds, thousands of generations within a human lifetime. For such beings, the memories, learnings and modes of passing on experience are, it almost goes without saying (yet it must be said as it is so often not), radically different from any human’s in terms of the ways they experience change. The immensity of the alterity is, literally, incomprehensible to humans. We can't know what these beings know. But we can be aware that they have knowledges and experiences beyond us. [...] [W]e should know they live and experience and think beyond us. We should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled […]. It is not abstract, or empty.

[Text by: Bawaka Country et al. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum Volume 108. January 2020. Bold emphasis added.]

[buriedpentacles]

I think by now it's safe for us all to agree that "witch" and "pagan" are titles to self reclaim, and we ought to never automatically assume a magic worker is a witch and a polytheist is a pagan.

Not everyone of every faith, spirituality, and tradition wants to reclaim or associate with these terms, and they have their reasons. In many parts of the world, "witchcraft" and "paganism" are derogatory at best, dangerous at worst, or simply, inaccurate and not applicable.

So we call people what they wish to be called, we don't presume to know someone better than they know themselves, and we mind our own businesses and respect others.

[buriedpentacles]

Genuinely question in your opinion what are we exactly cleaning when we do self cleansing?

I have seen differents opinions from book authors in this matter

Just as with mundane cleaning, you are targeting something which you want to be removed, and removing it. Or, targeting something which must be sorted, and organizing it.

This 'something' should be understood to be ethereal energy, which everyone generates and encounters as part of normal life.

You can cleanse "energies of anger" but not "trauma that causes anger to be triggered." Cleansing =/= healing.

By and large, the thing that is being cleansed is just basically the ethereal equivalent of dust, body oils, sweat, and germs that you've accumulated by virtue of being a living thing that exists in the world.

You can also 'sort' your energies, although this might be referred to as centering and not necessarily cleansing itself.

If you've had a very muddy day - like customers shouting at you, people tearing into your dangerous saltwater cleansing methods, etc, some extra grim might accumulate. This is the equivalent of going dirt biking and needing an extra shower before bed.

Self cleansing (and centering) feels absolutely amazing, it's a great way to use magic to acquire good feelings.

[buriedpentacles]

Okay, I know the reblog was parody but now I'm wondering if that could be used as a self-cleansing. Like if I just put a small chunk of sea salt in a glass of water and drink it, would that do anything? I'm tempted to try it.

Sure, a let's see if we can invent one:

9 oz clean, filtered drinking water (from a safe source)(important)

3 grains kosher salt (bigger grains, easier to grab)

Point at the first grain of salt and say, "this is the new moon, and it draws away impurities into the ebb tides.

Point at the second grain of salt and say, "this is the full moon, and it draws purity up on the flood tides."

Point at the third grain of salt and say, "this is the changing moon, and it draws energies to their proper place."

Drop the salt grains into the water. Stir the water clockwise nine times, each time saying: the ocean cleanses.

Drink the water or leave it somewhere to passively cleanse a room.

[buriedpentacles]

I want to do a glamour spell that makes me present more androgynous (I am nonbinary AFAB), im very NEW to spells! So any advice? Or even where to start? :)

Thank you for your question! Here's an easy spell I'd suggest - when it comes to spellwork, let yourself mess around and be creative; try different things, edit and adjust this however your intuition guides you and see what works/what doesn't!!!

Create the image of yourself you want to portray - draw them, write a song about them, describe them as 2012 wattpad fanfic writer would, whatever you want and helps create the image best! Make yourself your muse! Focus more on the feelings and perception than specific physical attributes. Envision building this version of you from the ground up - this shall become your mask, your projection.

It can help to have a physical object to tie it to - a piece of jewellery, or shoes, or even things like your glasses. After you've "built" your mask, attach it to your physical item - this can be done through a simple incantation, clear instructions, and the visualisation of tying, stitching or even gluing your mask to the physical item.

You can honestly customise this process however you like - it could be done entirely with energy work and visualisation if that's where your strength lies. If you prefer tactile and tangible actions then you could craft a small doll of your desired projection, filling it full of your ideal energy and projection, and physically attach it to your every day bag, or keys etc.

When you put on the jewellery, glasses, attach the keyring etc, take a moment to visualise pulling that mask over yourself and moulding into you - it isn't an uncomfortable, ill-fitting mask that hides you, it is a second skin that melds to your body and emphasises/highlights what you already are. Remember that it is not about changing your physical appearance, but about changing the energy you project and other's perceptions of you.

There's also other stuff you could add or mess around with - like making this charm be fuelled by misgendering (anytime someone misgenders you, that energy is pulled into the charm and charges it).

I wish you the best of luck - feel free to send another ask with further questions or even an update of if you tried this/how it went!! 💚🌿🪲

[buriedpentacles]

Love this explanation!!

For me, I have always envisioned and experienced energies as more similar to liquid (rather than light):

Some energies vary by viscosity or flow, some energies mix together well, others won't mix at all, and some have strange reactions to one another.

When I've had a very busy day (energetically and emotionally), I tend to feel as though a layer of oil has been dumped over my energy - it lingers over the top, sometimes smothering it.

Sometimes, the external energy is more like an algae - not always harmful, but can be in greater numbers. Sometimes something muddying and harmful grows from my energies (too much anger, repression, etc) that then smothers my energy more.

Self cleansing is the act of removing this oil or algae, skimming the dirt and debris from the surface. It has nothing to do with "negative" energy and everything to do with maintaining the ecosystem of my energy!!

Genuinely question in your opinion what are we exactly cleaning when we do self cleansing?

I have seen differents opinions from book authors in this matter

Just as with mundane cleaning, you are targeting something which you want to be removed, and removing it. Or, targeting something which must be sorted, and organizing it.

This 'something' should be understood to be ethereal energy, which everyone generates and encounters as part of normal life.

You can cleanse "energies of anger" but not "trauma that causes anger to be triggered." Cleansing =/= healing.

By and large, the thing that is being cleansed is just basically the ethereal equivalent of dust, body oils, sweat, and germs that you've accumulated by virtue of being a living thing that exists in the world.

You can also 'sort' your energies, although this might be referred to as centering and not necessarily cleansing itself.

If you've had a very muddy day - like customers shouting at you, people tearing into your dangerous saltwater cleansing methods, etc, some extra grim might accumulate. This is the equivalent of going dirt biking and needing an extra shower before bed.

Self cleansing (and centering) feels absolutely amazing, it's a great way to use magic to acquire good feelings.

[buriedpentacles]

Beginner Tips for Interpreting Tarot (with Real Examples)

There’s this game called Powerpoint Karaoke. In the game, someone makes up a short series of powerpoint presentation slides. They will give the whole presentation a title, and then pick related or unrelated images to go on the slides. Another person has to give the presentation to the audience - basically improvising along the way the best they can to turn a random topic plus random images into a coherent presentation.  Reading tarot is a lot like doing Powerpoint Karaoke. The title of the presentation is the question you ask, and the cards are the slides. The better you are at stringing disparate images into a coherent narrative on the fly, the better you will be at making sense of tarot spreads.  For each of these tips, I will illustrate it with a real question that I am genuinely asking my tarot, the card I pull, and how I interpret it. 1. Ask clear questions. It is ten times harder to interpret an answer when the question was muddled in the first place. Your questions can be general, or specific, but it’s best to only ask one question at a time. I think about the wording of my question for a while before I actually answer it. I might think at first, “How is this new creative project thing going to go? Should I start it on the New Moon, or am I going to be an unproductive mess this week? Is it a bad month to start it? Why have I been so unproductive?” I’ll take that and cut it down - for instance, removing my own speculations about myself and how it will go and all of the different options. If that stuff is relevant, it will come up in the cards. I end up with a straight-forward question that is open to lots of different answers: “Is it a good move to start working on my new creative project at the New Moon?“ Example: Is it a good move to start working on my new creative project at the New Moon? Ace of Pentacles. Ooh. This seems like a good omen to me. It is not particularly hard to interpret because it feels very on the nose, because Aces are about beginnings. And it indicates that whatever I do could eventually become profitable, even though that’s not explicitly my intention.  2. Get rid of any preconceived notion of what the answer will be. Sometimes you turn over the exact card you are anticipating - like me the time I flippantly asked my tarot deck what my persistent headache might be from and thought, “I’m probably just dehydrated and it’s going to be Temperance or some shit like that.” But other times the card you get will not fit into the mold of what you are expecting. The answer you get is not always going to be the answer you want. Sometimes you are just looking for a “Should I keep going with this story or scrap it and start something new?” but that assumes that one of those options is the correct answer. Your cards may think that you should keep going with the story, but change it in some way. Or maybe you should scrap it and not start on something new right away. If you are expecting a purely yes-or-no type of answer, you may feel confused by the result you get. I often ask questions that could have a whole range of answers, instead of expecting a specific type of answer, so instead I might say, “What should I write about?” Example: What should I write about? The Chariot. This card is about overcoming obstacles, and maintaining control. It’s not really at all what I was starting to write about recently. This is definitely a card where the interpretation isn’t obvious to me. I’ve just been sitting here and had flash of realization that I think maybe I was asking the wrong question - ironic for an example about having preconceived notions. But this actually illustrates the “having preconceived notions” thing perfectly. I asked it what I should write about, and the flash of realization I just had about the message of the Chariot is, “You worry too much about what you should write about, when you will only succeed by actually putting in the effort of writing. Stop worrying about the content - write about anything as long as you are actually writing instead of pacing and contemplating.” So yeah - sometimes the answer you need is not the answer you want.  3. Read interpretations of the cards online. Yes, this is obvious. But it needs to be said because a lot of people have strong, contrary ideas about how tarot should be done. You don’t have to read only the pictures, or have a list of associations memorized, or expect the answer to come purely from your intuition. Lots of sites online offer long and detailed explanations for each tarot card upright and reversed. Often cards can have several meanings, and while reading on a few different interpretations a meaning may jump out at you as obvious.  Example: What’s going to happen this week?  The Moon. This card always seems hazy to me, so it’s a good one to look up. This site says, “On the New Moon, set your intentions and plant the seeds of opportunity so they can grow,” which feels relevant given that the New Moon is this week. This site says, “The towers on the opposing ends represent the forces of good and evil, and their similarity in appearance can allude to the difficulties that we face in distinguishing between them,” which frankly sounds like America to me right now. It also says, “the negative energies must be released and turned into something constructive.” I wouldn’t necessarily gather all of that just from relying on my own ideas about what this card means, but seeing it written here feels very apt for what Americans are going through - both last week and I guess maybe the upcoming week. 

4. Generate a bunch of different ideas for what the cards might mean. If the answer doesn’t seem obvious or immediate, write down three or four things you think it could be saying. Write down all of the associations that spring to mind, even if they seem stupid, and then whittle them down later. You may have some intuitive sense of which interpretation is correct, or one interpretation will grow on you the longer you sit with it. Sometimes the answer may have shades of all of the interpretations you came up with.  Example: What is the best way to spend my Sunday? Three of Pentacles. For me, this could go a few different ways. I asked my deck once what someone thought of me and got this card. So I associate this card with that person. It is that person’s birthday today, so it may be indicating that I should actually reach out to them. I have some good reasons for not doing that though. Or it may be a much less personal interpretation, telling me to do something collaborative. The more that I think about it, the more I think it may also relate to the first card. I’m drawing a connection here because the suit is the same. I’ve kept my ideas about my new creative project entirely to myself, but maybe before embarking on it I should get feedback from someone else on the aspects of it I’ve been struggling with. I think that’s the interpretation I’m going to go with.  5. Ask your cards silly, simple, or non-consequential questions. If you only ask serious questions where you really need an answer, you may feel way more pressure to interpret the cards correctly. As practice, it can help just to ask casual questions like “What should I eat for dinner?” and see what it says. In fact, I’ll do that right now just to show how I would interpret it. Example: What should I eat for dinner tomorrow? Six of Wands. The meaning of this card is ‘success’ and ‘praise’ and things like that, so it kind of reminds me of how I would always choose lobster on birthdays, or after my choir concerts, or middle school graduation and those types of events when I got to pick what to eat. It is definitely a celebration food for me. This is actually a card that is like ‘the answer I want but not the answer I need,” because I don’t know where I’m going to get lobster for dinner tomorrow. Maybe seafood in general will do, because I have salmon I could make. Overall - interpretations are very personal. In the examples I’ve included, someone else may not draw the same conclusion just from the card and the question because they don’t have all of that background knowledge about me to draw from. One of the best things to do when interpreting tarot readings for yourself is just to know yourself - and be able to look at yourself honestly.

[buriedpentacles]

I think some witches feel the need to differentiate and distinguish themselves from everybody else at every opportunity possible because they believe witches are super duper special for being witches or something. Thus the various ridiculous inventions for spelling the word "magic".

Here's the thing though: we're not special. We're as human as people who aren't witches. It's a craft that we practice. It doesn't make us superhuman or anything.