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a copper IUD is a type of protective amulet

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Actually I want to discuss this! (Briefly because I have assignments to do)

I just KNOW this would piss people off, frankly this post is modern witch tips bait.

But why?

Someone explain why this is any different.

Its tomatoes, salt, sugar, and vinager. True a lot of ketchups have other more modern ingredients for preservation but we also live in a time where "natrual" is marketable and even at the cheap grocery store I go to they have the fancy "only 3 ingredients" type options, and I just KNOW thats not actually the problem with it.

So someone who thinks this doesn't work come here and tell me exactly why it doesn't.

And personally, I dont think it would work for me. I dont do that type of magic, I'm not an ingredients person. But thats UPG, not even close to a universal rule infact I would consider it counter to what most magic is and has historically been which is *what ever you can get your hands on* type magic. (People didnt use horseshoes because they were special they used them because they had a ton of them and they're iorn)

So if you are an ingredients type practitioner, explain to me why it doesn't work for a reason other than it makes you uncomfortable to question what gives something magic.

Explain why it doesn't work other than it makes you have to confront wheather any* of the items you use actually work.

I won't accept anwsers such as "because you didnt grow the tomato your self" because *most people do not grow all their ingredients*.

And if you have to grow your ingredients thats your UPG. Its not a rule and its not even all that common. Many of us like gardening and crafting but not all of us can or do. And really, did you mine the quartz your self?

How many of us use alcohol as an offering? Do you think I hand made the whisky? Tell me right now why the whisky I buy for my Domovoy is any different than the ketchup you buy from the same store.

is it potentially controversial to suggest ketchup would be a perfectly good ingredient for protection magic in a pinch?

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Isabella Owens art 

@issabelaowensart (Instagram)

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Mariya Tobischek - Steal the night, 2024

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Recreation of Vasilisa the Beautiful at the Hut of Baba Yaga (Illustrator: Ivan Bilibin) - Matka Snowflake

Source

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More tea leaf divination knowledge. Take notes.

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THE ENTIRE WEST IS BEING PUT UP FOR SALE AND I AM BEGGING YOU TO CALL YOUR SENATORS

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

I don’t have a huge following but please, everywhere I have ever loved, the forests I grew up playing in, the land I got married on, is all at risk and I am begging.

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What if spells radiate in all directions in time, so the reason that it seems like things were destined to work out well even before you cast, is because the spell was working backwards from the point when you cast it.

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Morphological differences between thorns, spines, and prickles

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Imo this is how most people approach tarot, and I think that makes it not-not real because in my expiriance thats p much its intended use

However the mechanism which people use to read can be different (and this applies to many forms of divination not just tarot.) For example if someone says they are chanelling spirits to provide them with the anwsers then the same could be said for rune stones, dice, orical cards, what have you, whereas someone just as likely can use any of those forms of divination through the interpretation of commonly accepted symbolism.

Which isnt to say youre either right or wrong but I think that doesn't make it any less real.

Ive tried it multiple ways, and the way I do it most frequently is through symbol interpretation/introspection because thats just an easy default for me personally.

Ive tried other ways that involve what someone might describe as channeling or conjuring, and found the results to be much, much more straight forwards and accurate, but its also very time consuming and energy exhausting for me and Ive never used that to apply to anyone else, only for my own self. But in doing that, it had nothing to do with the cards themselves, it was just the cards that were used as a mechanism of interpretation of the channeling I was doing. So, basically a long winded way of saying that tarot cards are just paper with print on them, and each reader can choose which ever mechanism works best for them to utilize them. There's nothing mystical about the cards alone, but that doesn't (in my opinion) make them fake or not real, they're still working as intended.

My sister is a writer and sometimes will pull cards at random to help build a story board, which I think is a cool and different way to use them!

"I don't believe Tarot is real, but it does work"

Expand on that, king (genuinely curious)

I feel like…

okay, so it’s a lot like conceptual art, or like introspective meditation, at the risk of sounding pretentious

Like. It’s not so much about “the cards are a portal to a higher wisdom that knows more than me” thing- it’s more of a, “given the symbols drawn, could I interpret them posing a question or possibility or suggestion?” Followed by, “is this applicable to my current context? COULD it be?”

Like.

I don’t lay out á tarot hand and say “ah yes, the devil and the tower, I am about to be betrayed”

But I MAY lay out a hand and say, “okay, devil and the tower. Something treacherous and danger. Am I approaching a treacherous or risky situation in my life? What might be a tipping factor? Am I being deliberately reckless? Maybe I should spend some more time working on X project I’ e been thinking of before spending money on it” or “you know what, I HAVE been kind of uncomfortable with X thing, I should say something” or “yeah okay I KNOW Tom from work sucks to work with, I KNOW, yeah maybe I should consider ways of handling that”

Less of a magic oracle, more of a tool for doing literary analysis on real life. Like simplifying everything and laying it out flat so I can gain some distance to untangle my problems without in-your-head crap like projected feelings and social obligation getting in the way and muddying the waters.

So like. I don’t think tarot cards can legit tell the future, but I DO think that self-reflection, mindfulness, and consideration sometimes allow us to predict and calculate our own circumstances.

So, IMO- It’s not real. But it works

If that makes sense

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Datura

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Aspirin is a bit firey given its platelet aggregation abilities.

I imagine the spirit of ice packs is very friendly and kind, sort of like the spirit of hot pads; they've both got a crystalline quality like old honey. I imagine that the spirit of ibuprofen is like a lot of gnomes with head lamps, going down into the mines.

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Trey the Explainer's quest to learn about Bigfoot mythology and find out whether there were actually all these stories that supported its existence is an excellent example of why you can't trust non-Indigenous people when they go around claiming Indigenous traditions support a fringe idea. Basically? They're probably being really racist and completely misrepresenting these traditions.

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Appalachian Folk Magic and The Question Of Appropriation.

"Appalachian folk magic" is spoken of as if it were a single monolithic Tradition.

It's not. It's really really not. It's threads from multiple intermixed traditions, further intermixed and evolved due to the isolation of the people and the very overt and accepted influence of the spirits of the land and The Knowing/The Cunning/The Sight/etc.

Plenty of us don't even particularly care for the word "magic". Most abilities and operations that will be shared are shared namelessly. It might be referred to by practitioners as witchcraft, a wives tale, a superstition, but usually it's straight up just instructions.

"Appalachian folk magic" is A Blanket Term for all folk magics from the general area. Not a mystical tradition distinct from those traditions. When people don't remember the metadata of "From The Pow Wow Tradition, or From the Ozarks or From Central Tennessee" the secrets get lumped into "Appalachian Folk Magic" and people discoursing appropriation tend to suggest by implication that "Appalachian Folk Magic" is thus a distinct "open" tradition, and that every named tradition (it refers to) is "closed".

That's really a dangerous and knee-jerk skeered sort of oversimplification. Most are "closed" in the sense of being isolated and handled with a sense of reverence and secrecy, but when an appalachian person teaches you to whisper the fire from a burn, it's understood that you will carry it on.

"Appalachian Folk Magic" is not a tradition. It's a generalization for data from some tradition without metadata referring to which. In an angry sense, it's bastardization. In an acedemic sense, it's a loose identification that might refer to many traditions and which one exactly depends on the metadata.

If someone teaches you something, it matters more that you remember the familial origin for it. I. E. "My germanic/scots-irish grandmother from Eastern Tennesee" or etc.

This information can make it a lot easier to determine the actual original tradition the working belongs to, by comparison of locale, approximate era, and rationale of the working. I.E. Uncle Billy who walked to the crossroads to see the man in black is going to have different conceptions of what he's doing than Aunty Jen who was a devout Christian healer with The Gifted Knowing, and It's a weee bit disrespectful to call Aunt Jens charms "witchcraft" when Jen herself, rest her soul, would never ever call it that, you feel me?

Understanding the relation between the worker and the work is key to figuring out which strand of people originated it, but that's never really the point of sharing it in appalachia, because we'll probably tell you where it came from to the best of our knowledge. The idea of cultural appropriation really isn't a thing we think about because usually, we're sharing stories about peoples loved ones. About what it was they did and where it came from and how they understood it. Disseminating that information wholly and completely is almost in itself an act of ancestral worship for us, an act of committed remembrance for our dead.

That information is usually given under the understanding that it will be remembered and not torn up go in someone elses arsenal under another name. That would be appropriation. And a dick move.

Secrets are heirlooms.

If I gave you my dead grandfathers wrist watch, you would remember it was his when you wore it. You should have the same kind of reverence in your head for spooky secrets. Cuz they are way more valuable than wristwatches and most of us take our ancestors and their workings very seriously.

If an appalachian person teaches you something, it's either because we love you, or we loved Aunty Jen and Uncle Billy, or you have a problem we know how to solve.

Moreover, if you had to blackjack someone against the head with Uncle Billy's wristwatch - you'd be grateful to Uncle Billy for it, wouldn't you?

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Idk why but this slide from my lecture is so funny to me

Something about crisis coming before mental illness, the terms they chose, the meter its self, its just so funny to me idk

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I keep reading your stuff on not liking Lilith anymore after looking more into it but can't find any posts on why. Can you explain it? The only things I've been able to findout about her is that she refused to be subservient to Adam so God made Eve. Whenever I see things on prayers to Lilith, it's for women to become more empowered by her.

It's not so much that I "don't like her anymore" and more just that I decided she doesn't have a place in my personal practice. If other Jewish practitioners find empowerment through her then that's perfectly fine because everybody is different! My relationship to her is just slightly more traditional I guess in that I don't necessarily regard her as a positive entity.

The story of her refusing to be subservient to Adam and therefore getting cast out is one specific midrash that comes from a work of satire, so it's not necessarily a mandatory or "essential" element of her mythos/folklore despite the narrative exploding in popularity in the last few decades. Not every interpretation of Lilith follows that origin story for her. In many Jewish traditions, Lilith is often seen as hating humanity and is the explanation behind infant deaths within a certain timeframe after birth. This isn't the same as her representing reproductive justice, because we're talking about actual babies that people wanted to have. There's also folklore about Lilith copulating with men in their sleep to cause wet dreams in order to create more demons. To me that sounds a lot more like sexual assault than it does sexual empowerment.

From what I've seen in how she's treated in traditional folk practice, Lilith much more often represents the corruption or defilement of something that is supposed to be sacred or empowering. Most of the traditional folk practice around her is about trying to keep her away, especially if you are intentionally pregnant. Lilith amulets are the example that comes to mind.

Granted, there's still value in the feminist reinterpretations of that one midrash and I don't knock anybody that is drawn to it or derives power from it, but I think it's important to remember that it's one story in a big pool of other stories. Some are compatible, some conflict very heavily. The only "wrong" way I'd say you can go about it would be acting like the modern feminist interpretation of Lilith is the One Secret True Lilith(tm) and just writing off every conflicting tradition that goes in a different direction as misongynist propaganda or pretending like it never existed.