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[mngael]

I have a big collection of PDFs with books and articles on Ancient history, religion, and culture - and I'd like to share it with others.

This link leads to a table with sources on Greco-Roman myths, culture, history, and religion: 🏺

This link leads to a folder with PDFs on majorly Greek, Roman, and Greco-Roman culture & more. However, I also have some books on Slavic and Thracian religion and culture as well as sources on studying Latin and Ancient Greek languages: 🏺

[mngael]

What an amazing mama bear!

[mngael]

Agreed. This has never sat right with me, every so-called "racial group" can have a huge range of skin tones, facial features etc.

Real talk but I really do not think we should be describing someone's race ("white person" "Asian girl" etc) in image descriptions unless it's relevant to the video/image and it's not about being aracial or decentralizing race or w/e, it's about not deciding that you know someone's racial and ethnic makeup based on a brief glimpse of them through tiktok filters.

Like you can just describe how they look without assigning a race to a complete stranger based on how they look. It's fine to do that.

[mngael]

Cool, I was interested in the Northumbrian runes when I came across them but found out that they are a modern invention, not historic. Do you have info contradicting this? Even if they are modern, I'm open to modern inspiration, and like seeing Scottish/British takes on Heathenry.

I'm happy to reveal the artwork for my upcoming book: NORTHUMBRIAN RUNE POEMS!

Inspired by the Old English Rune Poem, Northumbrian Rune Poems centres its focus on the Early Medieval English Futhorc runerows with additional attention paid to the four runes that were in use in Northumbria. Mixing free verse poetry with kennings found within Old Norse and Old English poetry, Northumbrian Rune Poems is a magical read that breathes new life into an otherwise neglected runerow. Alongside each poem is an Old English adaptation written in a Northumbrian dialect using Old English alliterative style to capture the spirit of the poems in a new light.

Old English translations were done by C. Ryan Moniz. You can check out more of his work here:

https://ingwine.neocities.org/

The artwork was designed by the incredibly talented Drekisdottir. You can check out more of their work here:

https://www.redbubble.com/people/drekisdottir/shop

Northumbrian Rune Poems will be released on 1st August 2023 (otherwise known as Yorkshire Day). You can pre-order either a signed or unsigned copy here for the pre-order price of £12, plus postage and packaging:

https://ko-fi.com/s/ed8753499f

[mngael]

Dragons in architecture

[mngael]

Great list, I will check thru these to see if I can add anything for my local area. There are a couple groups here that do car & bike repair for free or provide space & tools for people to do so. Also will look for disability specific stuff. I'd love to see disabled people run a co-op that fixes/makes/modifies wheelchairs/mobility aids & other gear.

Pops’s Great Big Mutual Aid Masterpost

So, this isn’t the first post ever made like this, but I’m trying to do something a little different than just posting a bunch of links. I’m only gonna include resources that are international, common, displayed either as a map or as a geographically-sorted list, and easy to participate in, to make this masterpost as accessible as I possibly can. If you’re reading this post you’re probably an English-speaker with an internet connection, and so with that in mind my goal here is that any given link you click will have a decent chance of having something near you, and there will almost certainly be at least one link on this list with something you can plug into

Groups

Mutual Aid Wiki - A map of mutual aid groups of all kinds, largely (but not exclusively) ones started in response to the pandemic

Food Not Bombs - A map of free public meals from rescued food waste. Can be a little outdated

Buy Nothing Project - A list of hyper-local gift economy groups

Trash Nothing - A list of local groups where people give and request things that would otherwise be thrown away

Transition Network - A map of local groups seeking to build sustainable circular economies from the ground up, for people, not profits

Industrial Workers of the World - One big labor union for everybody, with local chapters across much of the world

Locations

Slingshot Collective’s Radical Contact List - An international catch-all list of projects

Intentional Community Directory - A map of communes, housing coops, land trusts, eco-villages, and similar communal living projects

Repair Cafés - A map of spaces where you can show up and have your broken items repaired for free (or volunteer to do so for others)

Sharing Spaces

Little Free Library’s Sharing Box Map - A map of little free libraries that have been converted into sharing spaces for food, personal care, or hygiene items

Freedges - A map of community refrigerators for sharing food

Little Free Pantries - A map of sharing boxes for non-perishable food

Can’t Find Anything?

None of these lists are comprehensive, and these aren’t the only resources available either. Try using a search engine or looking on social media with keywords like “[your location] mutual aid”

If you’ve looked everywhere you can think of but are still coming up short, you can DM me (not on anon) with the rough area where you live and I’ll try to find some stuff for you

Maybe you could start something yourself! Here are some resources: How to Form an Affinity Group, Small Town Organizing for Anarchists, resources for mutual aid groups from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, seven steps to starting a Food Not Bombs group

If you don’t have even a single accomplice to start an affinity group with, there are still actions you can take on your own! Check out my #practical tag for ideas

[mngael]

For sharing next time someone misuses "woke".

Stay woke.

[mngael]

The itsy bitsy spider wanted to be more famous...this headline is so British, Roald Dahl wished he'd thought of it.

[mngael]

Wow, this is an amazingly thorough post! Thanks for sharing your research.

Local Cultus, One of Many Introspections

There is no singular Greek religion.

Instead, what we think of as the “Greek religion” is a mishmash of multiple city state’s local cultus that share overarching themes and deities. Mingled with the panhellenic ideals of manhood we come up with a generalized idea of a religion that we can all claim to share, even if individual practices vary widely and wildly. The idea of one person worshiping all the aspects of a deity as listed in a place like theoi.com is antithetical to how the ancient society of Hellenes (ancient Greece) would have considered. Instead, each city-state developed rituals, aspects, epithets, and cults that suited themselves and their needs. I will be answering the questions: what is local cultus? How did the Greeks utilize local cultus in their own practice? How can we take that knowledge and use it when building our own practices?

Keep reading

[mngael]

Local cultus 3: Dionysus without grapes

Same disclaimer as my previous post on local cultus: This will not be informative unless you’re interested in how I approach the issues I'm trying to solve. Note that obviously this is stuffed with UPG.

The grapevine (vitis vinifera) doesn't naturally grow in this northern part of the world (reminder that I'm on the same latitude as southern Alaska). While there is some wine production in some parts of Sweden, Finland is still too up North for grape and wine production (though there have been attempts and experiments which I won't get into).

I can't say it's been much of an issue since imports from southern countries make grape products easily available (albeit at a slightly higher price), but when considering local cultus and how to adapt to what the soil here provides, you still need to dig a bit deeper.

There were several questions to consider when thinking about the possibility of a local Dionysian practice:

What are local alcohols?

Are there traditionally Dionysian elements that are present here?

Putting aside alcohols like beer and vodka, which I would more easily attribute to Demeter, two drinks stood out to me. The first is Terva, which is a liqueur made out of pine tar. My interest there is obviously in the use of a pine byproduct. The other drink is cloudberry wine/liqueur (lakkaviini / lakkalikööri). Technically, most, if not all, berries are fermentable to make fruit wine. My interest in cloudberry especially comes from the environment they naturally grow in: the marsh.

Dionysus has the epithet "of the marsh/swamp" (Limnaios) in Athens as well as a temple of the same name, which seems to have been mostly in use for the Anthesteria and for the Oschophoria.

You get the point, it's this kind of connection I'm looking for. I haven't yet grabbed a bottle, but it's on my list of things to try out in practice.

[mngael]

Local cultus 2: problem-solving personal practice

Back in 2017 I wrote about my personal local cultus, which was mainly centered around sea gods. It's been 4 years and that post is now completely outdated, since I'm now in a completely different country, not to mention that my practice has also changed a lot. This will not be informative unless you're interested in how I approached the issue. Note that obviously this is stuffed with UPG.

I was living in an environment where the climate was similar enough to Greece that I didn't need to do much tweaking, if at all. That has drastically changed when I moved.

There are two main points that I needed to take into consideration when thinking about adapting my faith to a new land:

what is the local nature like / does traditional flora grow here?

was this land known by the ancients / have the gods been worshipped here?

I went from answering those two interrogations by yes/yes to no/no, and because the nature here is so different, there came the need to find appropriate replacements. Before thinking about replacements, though, I checked what was in common:

Apple tree: sacred to Hera and Aphrodite, easily available.

Barley: For the altar. Finland's biggest cereal production is barley. All good there.

Hazel: Artemis had a grove of "karya" which can mean both hazelnut and walnut.

Oak: sacred to Zeus, easily findable, especially in the south.

Pine: Sacred to Dionysus and Pan. More precisely, (Northern) Greece and Finland only have two pine species in common though, the Scots pine (pinus sylvestris) and the Macedonian pine (pinus peuce). Not a problem for pinecones and wreaths, more of a ??? when it comes to using the resin and whether or not it is comparable to the one of the Aleppo pine, which is the one traditionally used for wine and which probably created the association to Dionysus.

Willow: The white willow (salix alba) is probably sacred to Persephone (Homer mentions the tree as being in the Underworld), but I have little relationship with her. My focus is more on the "goat willow" (salix caprea), which I associate with Pan.

So those are nice to have, but I'm left with 3 plants central to the religion that I don't have access to: the laurel, the olive and fig tree. The problem with them is not finding the fruits or even leaves. Most supermarkets will have olives, figs (dried at any time, fresh depending on season) and laurel leaves. The issue resides in finding branches and/or wood, not for offerings but either for ritual tools (eiresione, hiketeia) or for decoration (wreaths).

When I made my eiresione, I went for a silver birch replacement that was favorably confirmed via divination, but I decided to dig a bit deeper into the potential of the association, especially in regards to Apollo. The silver birch places itself has a culturally important tree in a way comparable to what both the olive and laurel tree mean to the Greeks. The sap is 99% water, harvestable and drinkable and has been historically used for soap making. Those elements, coupled with the fact that the silver birch is present in the northern regions of Greece make it a good candidate to be associated with Apollo and make the divination result make a lot of sense.

This is getting long so I'll conclude there for now: there's still a fair amount of work left to do and a ton to explore and learn. My next focus now will be about finding a proper replacement for a fennel stalk. Might update this post at some point if new, valuable information arise.

[mngael]

I love it! It may seem strange to celebrate to some, but it can be so hard to get a diagnosis. It's a weird catharsis like "finally they see me!" (I was dxed autism younger but wasn't dx-ed with ADHD til I was an adult, I sought it out after a shrink thought I had Bipolar Type II & researched it & thought it didn't seem right.

i got formally diagnosed this week after years of waiting/knowing and my friend mailed a professionally custom made cake to my house

[mngael]

All About: House Spirits

Well, it's about time I brought them up once again, in their own post. This guide may be on the lengthy side, but it's here to explain what they are and how to begin working with them.

What the hell is a house spirit?

House spirits come from all different cultures and folklore. Known as, you guessed it, guardians of the home. They protect the house itself, the land around it (they get along with the land spirit(s) most of the time), and they also protect the family if treated right. A home certainly doesn't feel like one without these presiding spirits helping. In fact it gives the home a life of it's own.

What do they look like? Are there types?

Across many cultures, there are these spirits and the folklore varies for each. In my tribe, we consider them to usually be little dwarves or goblins that must be appeased, otherwise they will cause bad luck or even resort to curses. Regular offerings are required. Then there are the land spirits, which is a whole other topic. If given regular offerings and respect, we believe that they will not only generate good luck and events for us, but protect us and help with our daily lives. For the witches of the tribe, they will often assist in rituals and spells. That all being said, this has carried over into my personal beliefs. Many cultures describe house spirits assisting with the same things and if they are displeased, bad occurrences following. As far as looks go, it depends on the folklore surrounding your area and your cultural background(s). You may believe in one or two types or an entire spectrum of house spirits from the realm of the fair folk. You could have one house spirit or twelve. It's entirely up to your home. In some cultures, there are door spirits (yes, that guard the doors) and ones that work in the kitchen, among others for different functions of the home.

Okay so, I live in an apartment building. Can I still work with them?

Yes. When I used to live in apartments, I found it was an either/or situation regarding how many were there. Some buildings have only a few that roam around, sometimes only one that protects the entire building, or there may be multiple hanging out in one apartment. Most complexes have multiple however. And then for the lucky buildings that have one for each apartment...those are nice. I've included a short offering ritual at the end of this post, which you can use to ask questions about whatever you wish to know, including how many there are in the building.

What kind of offerings do they like?

Milk, honey, bread, and herbs are a safe bet. They especially like bread baked by you, as they see it as a labor of love and that your energy is in there. Taking time to tend to the garden and taking care of your property & home in general are things they like to see. Don't leave the house a huge mess, as many prefer a tidy atmosphere. Not an offering per say, but important to mention nonetheless.

What should I put on their altar?

I keep my altar for them in the kitchen, as it is in a place that is undisturbed and can't be torn up by my land shark (aka, my dog). I also feel that most of the house spirits I have worked with in my life enjoy hanging out in this area of the home. They seem to like assisting in kitchen magic and cooking in general and the warmth of the stove. You may also want to include a small area near the front door if you believe that there are separate spirits for there. I'd recommend a shelf, as it won't take up as much space in the entryway.

Okay, back on track. Plants (if the space gets enough light), a cauldron, candles, offering bowls, a chalice, glass, or mug of some sort. A special spoon to stir the drinks or potions with. Decorative pieces from nature. Things you craft by hand.

How can I begin working with them?

Anytime, in reality. However, you do have to develop an actual relationship with them. This can take time and the more you speak to them, give offerings, and invite them in as you cook or clean, the more they will be willing to help with your spellwork, wards, and healing. Try the introduction ritual I've included. See what happens. Document it. Try again another time the following week. And just...keep going. Make sure that they know you haven't forgotten about them by leaving a small nightly glass of milk out before you head to bed. It doesn't have to be filled to the rim (hey, cost of living is ridiculous right now). It can be a splash with a squirt of honey added. Or a sprinkle of herbs on their bowl. Or maybe a small helping of what you whipped up for dinner. Point is to show them that you acknowledge and respect their presence. That will be the biggest component. Do the ritual once a week until you start seeing signs of contact. Once you do, make your own ritual with them. Incorporate them into your daily life. Ask them to help with blessing your cooking. Ask them to make sure your wards are in tact. Ask the door spirit to purify the energy of anyone that walks in & make bad people resist coming by. Start seeing if they'd like to sit in on a ritual, if you feel comfortable with that idea. Ask for a blessing when you clean the house & to assist you in removing all the bad energy.

Brief introductory ritual

To introduce yourself to your house spirits, I recommend sitting in your kitchen. If you consider your hearth to be the living room, you can choose to do it there. Make sure to bring offerings with that you feel will be applicable. Freshly baked bread (from your own hands) and some milk with honey stirred in would make a wonderful first treat. I usually introduce myself in a new home by bringing these treats to the location of choice, and start by speaking my intention aloud which goes something like:

"Spirits of the home,

Guardians and Protectors of this dwelling,

Please come sit with me and enjoy these offerings.

I wish to have a working relationship where we can honor, respect, and help each other."

I usually spend about ten-twenty minutes meditating after this is spoken aloud. Sometimes you will feel a strong presence. This is the time I take to set up my kitchen altar as well. If there is a place that I am able to create a mini-altar by the front door, I do so there for the door spirits. The land spirits get their own little thing out in the backyard. I've found in the many places I've lived, they almost always work together and some house spirits spend quite some time out there too!

From here on out, you'll develop your relationship with regular offerings and take it from there!

[mngael]

So true. We get a lot of New Age nonsense & colonial/romantic exoticism attached to Gaelic/Brythonic & other Celtic stuff but the "oh no curses" is pretty much always about fairies (even if it's distorted ideas about them) not burial sites or artefacts generally. Or ancient alien crap. The British, some other Europeans & western occultists are to blame.

Anyone talking about 'curses' and 'letting curses out if you open things' on the Pyramid post, but also y'know Ancient Egypt in general?

Thanks for perpetuating Orientalist othering! That's pretty racist of you!

✨Go Fuck Yourself✨

[mngael]

Yes! Undervaluing traditional "women's work" is really bad feminism! I like crafts (tho I'd like to learn more about sewing/other fabric arts) we take our machine-made fabric for granted but it's still an important skill set. It's also fun when characters use feminine stuff in a badass way, like Peggy Carter (in the TV show, I'm less familiar with comics & haven't seen the movies)

I don’t get how in fantasy fiction, the women who actually enjoy sewing/embroidering are always painted as the weak, boring, and anti-feminist characters 

Sewing and embroidery take skill, patience, and artistic talent and it was also the ultimate way to ignore the annoying men in your life in past centuries 

If you didn’t feel like talking to a man, you just “took up your sewing” and he’d have to leave you alone, especially if he needed that shirt mended

Women also got together all the time to sew, weave, embroider but also talk, gossip, assist each other’s work, and enjoy each other’s company in peace 

The skill the female character has doesn’t have to be sword-fighting for her to be strong, because there’s strength and power in any skill she has 

[mngael]

i love libraries but i wish ppl would stop acting like they’re a utopia that exists outside the bounds of oppression except for when it helps tbh.

i have only ever felt welcome in libraries where the staff looks like me, and that’s including when i WORKED at a library as a student volunteer at age 14/15 when one of my grown as fuck 40+ white colleagues refused to be alone in a room with me because i made her uncomfortable by virtue of being Black :) wouldn’t even sort magazines standing next to me, at that, because i was such a threat to her apparently. 

this whole “uwu librarians are just such sweet people! librarians become librarians because they love people! we exist to support the community!” shows me very clearly where people are coming from and it’s not my reality. libraries should be that but don’t pretend those are things that can be assumed lmao.

[mngael]

What to get me for my birthday!

The main bundle has 69 (heh) games for $60. The sister bundle has 66 games for $10.

The sale runs Feb 10-24, 2023