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hystericalcherries · 5 years

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post-s8 klance fic recommendations!

here are some post-s8 klance fic for the soul. some are fix-it and some are canon-divergent, so take heed. more under the cut.

And Slowly, So it Goes by Ashesofthefirststar

incomplete (1/?); post-canon; lance joins the blades’ humanitarian effort and pining ensues

Summary: Keith snorts, swiping away the holoscreen. “It’s one lady,” he says as he picks up the first crate. “And somehow I don’t think it’s your farmers tan that's keeping you.”

“You’ve been checking out my farmers tan, Keithy boy?”

Keith doesn’t give Lance the satisfaction he wants. “You’re too nice, is what it is.”

“Says the guy who started his own humanitarian organization.”

As soon as Keith turns, there’s a crate pushing against Lance’s chest. Unprepared, he grapples to find a grip, but Keith’s hold is steady. When Lance finally finds purchase, there's a hand brushing against his own.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing, Lance.”

Or: Lance joins the Blade of Marmora, but what started off as a way to better honor Allura’s memory turns into a lesson on what it means to trust himself again.

Suspended Momentum by AstroLatte

complete (6/6); post-canon; the space crew become teachers at the garrison and keith pines hard

Summary: Three years after the end of the war, Shiro makes his way to Lance's family's farm and offers Lance an opportunity to be an instructor at the Garrison. Although he's never taught before, Lance learns about grief, love and what it means to heal.

it was storming outside by jilliancares

complete (1/1); post-canon; keith visits lance on his farm

Summary: Keith’s plan was thrown out the window as he tumbled in the window. His foot caught on the ledge and he gasped as he practically flung himself onto the bed, landing on top of Lance and blinking at the sudden pressure of a bayard against his temple.

“Don’t shoot,” he said meekly, trying to smile at Lance, who was blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

A post S8 fic where Keith realizes that Lance is in need of a friend, and - being hopelessly in love with him - goes back to earth to be with him.

To Brighter Days by speaks

complete (1/1); fix-it; lance wants to explore the universe with keith, not understanding the thought is mutual

Summary: “Lance!”

The word floats at him like a lantern through the fog, and he lifts his head to the light. He’s dreaming now, right? Handheld slowly into death by a comforting hallucination?

No. No, the owner of that voice is really here.

The shape of him is a beacon of familiarity in this upside-down hellish nightmare, and Lance is just gone enough to let himself feel saved even though he knows better. Because somehow, at the end of the world, somehow Keith Kogane is here, emerging from the smoke and the flashing lights like some kind of hero. Despite everything, despite the taste of blood between his teeth, Lance feels his lip twitch upward into a tired smile. Because of course Keith is here. Of course. Where else would he be?

The war ends, and Lance must take on the monumental choice of what he's going to do next with his life. The clock is ticking and even though they've won the war, it looks like Keith is STILL going to slip away from him.

That is, unless he does what he does best, and just takes the shot.

aeon by hystericalcherries

incomplete (1/5); shameless self-plug; fix-it; prophetic visions; keith begrudgingly falls in love and acts on it

Summary: Keith does not leave the quantum abyss untouched.

“Home can be anything, you know,” Lance says in lieu of a conversation starter.

Slivers of moonlight filter through the blinds above their heads, casting lines of truth across the sheets. Lance tilts his head forward and a band slides over his eyes, catching the ocean in them and drawing Keith into their rolling tides. And as distracted as he is, he doesn't put up a fight when a hand clasps his own, reeling them heartward.

“Home is just something you can come back to.” His knuckles brush against the soft fabric of a nightshirt, the v-neckline falling loose to reveal a sharp collarbone, and Keith feels his breath hitching. “Something that keeps you grounded.”

sunflower by xintong

incomplete (2/6); post-canon; keith confesses and lance falls hard

Summary: On the morning of their first summer back on Earth, Lance receives a gift of sunflowers. A confession, a rejection, and the passage of time, all leading to the one person who's always been there for him.

Better Not by blades_of_voltron

complete (1/1); post-canon; essentially pidge and hunk help lance realizes he loves keith

Summary: Nobody said moving on from Allura was going to be easy. Nobody said Lance had to do it alone either.

(un)spoken by hiuythn

complete (3/3); fix-it; allura lives; fuck farmer lance

Summary: And Allura says, "Honerva is dead."

Or, I suplex s8 into the Earth's core. No mercy.

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pastelgrungewrecker · 6 years

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Life Lessons

((Direct continuation of this))

“-should I have been one to DIE on Garrus 9?!-”

“At least we agree on something, then.”

The words bothered him.

The look on Brainstorm’s face like an infuriated judge burned in his processor.

He stood in the bar, surrounded by silence and the disgust he had just announced when a slow clap rang out in a bitterly sarcastic tempo.

Drift stood up, finials slanted back, clapped hands with claws uncapped.

“Bravo Whirl.”, he said flatly, “Well done! You succeeded in looking as stupid as everyone assumes you are. Way to offend every guttermech with two bits of RAM to rub together!”

“Who you callin’-”

“Before you launch into a monologue again maybe take ten kliks to realize what you just said, and to who.”

“I told ‘im the TRUTH.”

“You condemned him based on your own assumptions .”

“Listen here, hippy- He waltzes around actin’ like a big shot sniper when we all know he’s -”

“A sniper. That’s what he is now.”, interrupted Drift, his voice still deadpan, “Because the Wreckers , who you praise oh- so-highly, left him to die, like a bunch of cowards. They left him to die, on a Decepticon ship, and never expected him to come back. And in response to the gutless behavior of the unit- one of whom was Blaster if I remember-”

The mech in question lowered his helm between his shoulders, as though hiding from the words.

“Perceptor rebuilt himself from the ground up, outperformed the mechs you praise, saved them from a combiner with a single shot from a rifle he mostly taught himself how to use....”

Whirl felt optics on him, and didn’t like it.

“While your greatest accomplishment was what? Being so unsatisfactory in your attempts at kissing aft that you got veto’d?”

Drift’s optic twitched, his throat shifted unnoticeably as he stalked over to the towering frame of a Wrecker glaring at him in a mixture of discomfort and rage.

“Outta everyone here, Whirl, you should know how it feels t’be left behind by the ones you thought you could trust.”, Drift growled low, Deadlock’s old drawl coating the words in cyanide like sugarglaze, “Perceptor isn’t a Wrecker, you’re right... He’s better than them, by a mile.”

Whirl raised a claw, ready to send it crashing down on Drift’s helm and shaking when the swordsmech still smiled at him.

“Go on. Hit me Whirl.”, he said quietly, “Hit me as hard as you can. Make yourself feel tough, go on. But I warn you- I’m not as nice as Perceptor. And I’ve killed a whole. Lot. More. Mechs. Than you OR your little buddies .” His voice was low, soft enough to only be between them now.

Whirl lowered the claw, slowly- Happy and silly as Drift acted; for all the hippy airs he put on- he was still Deadlock, under the white plating and swordplay. He was still dangerous, and had the survival skills of a glitchroach caught in nuclear fallout.

Drift tilted his helm, and time seemed to pass normally between them, “Good choice, Whirl. Maybe you should apologize to Perceptor, and clear the air. Get some good karma.”

Drift laughed quietly, walking cheerily off towards the exit and humming to himself while other mechs looked at Whirl with very obvious distaste.

Thoughts chased themselves in loops around Whirl’s processor before he looked to where Blaster hunched in his seat.

“Is all that TRUE.”

A nod.

“Y’mean he was LEFT BEHIND-”

“Look, Whirl, I don’t wanna fight, alright?!”, snapped Blaster, “And DAMN that con for bringin’ me in to this . Yeah, I admit it. We all thought Percy was a little off his rocker and hell no we didn’t like havin’ him around- hell, even Kup and Springer joked about him bein’ a bit of a loon. But Prowl stuck ‘im with us after Kup got rebuilt and that was that.”

“Keep talkin’ mech. I don’t like bein’ made a fool of.”

“We got on Turmoil’s battlecruiser. Percy was in charge of gettin’ us through the security and...”

“AND.”

“....And we might’ve forgotten to let him know proximity sensors were goin’ off. He got... injured.”

“What KIND of injured, mech. Drift said he pulled a full rebuild from the ground up.”

“Percy’ll kill me if I air his dirty laundry here-”

“And I’ll kill you if you don’t, so TALK.”

“He got shot.”, said Blaster in an almost mumble as Whirl stalked up behind him, looming over the communication’s officer, “Through the uh. The spark. An’ the optic.”

“And he was just. Left there.”

A nod.

“How in the hell did he survive then, which one a’ you went back for him?!”

“It’s like Percy said before he left, Whirl.”, continued Blaster, his words draped in a shroud of shame, “Drift pulled him off Turmoil’s ship. We’d already left; caught them both when Drift went into a freefall to escape. We... we never intended to bring him back. Figured he was just an unfortunate casualty.”

Whirl took a step back. He had spent aeons, aeons reminiscing about his old unit, about the mechs he had felt honestly close to. How long had he spent praising them, not just within range of Perceptor’s audials?

How long had he spent glorifying the mechs who watched Perceptor die?

His comm hummed to life, with Brainstorm on the other end.

::Whirl, get your aft to the lab. Now. We need to TALK.::

::You’re right. We do.::

#tf #whirl #drift #blaster #perceptor #Brainstorm

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cosmosfated · 6 years

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I think the most heartbreaking thing about Fleur is how he reacts to people saying they care about him. Not because he can't accept that people can, and that people do, but because of WHY it's so difficult to do exactly that.

He's been lied to. Deceived. Tricked, traded, betrayed, damned, left to die. He's been offered a hand to get to his feet, only for someone to bury a knife in his stomach when he finds solid ground. He's been offered kindness and warm smiles, only for it to turn icy and sinister as he chokes on the poison that burns his throat. He's been told that people care, he's been shown that people care, but quite honestly, you're going to have to try a lot harder than that to get him to actually try in return with you without the skepticism. Because that's all he's known-- betrayal is all he's ever known.

People have told him they loved him and proven only the same lesson he was taught decades, centuries, aeons prior. Love is just another type of Violence. He was a murderer- he still is. Violence was sewn into him with a bent needle, and the LOVE he harbors reflects in the constellations of scars on his skin. No one could truly learn to love something like me, he thought. No one could see the truth and still love me, so I will have to mold myself into something that people will love. Pretending- wearing a mask- being whoever he needed to be to get the job done... that was all he had ever known, and all that he felt he was good for.

His life was set for him before he was even conceived. He was fated to fall into terrible hands a long, long time ago. An angel cursed to fall from grace, a demon who can't quite be as heinous as his brothers, a god who doesn't match divinity, something truly monstrous, something that puts a very real fear into the hearts of even the bravest men. He was led to be a killer. He was trained to be the perfect wild card, the absolute end. All he knew was misery and death, and it followed him like ducklings to their mother. He struggled for so long because he hoped that the stories of heroes prevailing over their flaws and accepting them would be his saving grace- but in the end he "learned" that he's not a hero, and he's something villains are truly afraid of. Redemption wasn't anything close to what he deserved, but he would do whatever it took to survive. He had to. It was all he had left. And he never had a choice in the matter, no matter how many times people say that there's always a choice.

He has to continue forward with the knowledge that that simply isn't true. He has to continue forward with the knowledge of he's always got to be on his guard. Why? Because he wakes up every day having to lay there in varying degrees of pain as a reminder that he has no choice. Because he gets out of bed every day having to ignore the constant feeling of being half drowned, half burned. Because he smiles every day having to pretend that everything is going to be okay as a reminder that it was never about him. It was always about them, and to him it always will be. After all, it doesn't matter what they do. It doesn't matter how much they love him or how much LOVE he has. None of that matters, in the end. All that matters is that he makes a difference while he still can. Because even the timeless will run out of time eventually.

And when he does, he doesn't want anybody to hurt because they are and always were powerless to stop the inevitable.

...or at least, that's how he thinks.

#* canon. \ more to him than meets the eye.

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stellxuk · 4 years

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Broad lesson(s) from my solo trip

Some time has lapsed since I’d written the last post but as always words keep escaping me and at present time so o o o much has changed to how we’re essentially going about our daily lives. Being an introvert through and through, I don’t feel the effects of staying home as much as others but it has also created a new flux emotionally. I’ve been getting really vivid dreams (a side note), and have become more reminiscent of my trip to the UK, seeing it in different lights than the atomic now-I-know-I’m-not-a-solo-traveller vein.

It has brought me immense gratefulness (more than I can express without sounding like a brat who decided to spend money on a leisure trip in the midst of then an impending pandemic) that I got to experience what I experienced in the UK before everything started going downhill. A lot, and I mean a lot, of unfounded worries surrounded me during the trip, which made me think that it was just a wrong time to have travelled and experienced the cities I went to. But now it has, in my own windings and projections, taught me a lot of empathy for the kind of fears people are going through now, and how important it is more than ever to surround yourself with the assurance that this is a time that will pass. It has also opened up a lot about who I am as a person inherently as well.

Picking up The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett (a read I’d recommend) after reading 2 chapters and abandoning it for an awful long time (the pages have started to yellow kind of long), I understood how the irrational fears I felt during my trip were my cortisol levels trying to get me to hit optimum self-preservation mode and survive alone - something I have never done. Never! Of course my brain had trouble computing the experience then. I’ve never been physically alone more than an afternoon/ evening completing work at a cafe, or watching a movie solo, or a drive, or at most taking a solo flight (note that these aren’t survival activities but also just leisure activities). I’ve been wrapping my head around why I was so fearful and it seemed I couldn’t be at ease with myself more so than others who seemingly adapted pretty well to studying/living abroad alone.

But it wasn’t a measure of courage and sensibility, it was apples and oranges in how I was raised and the circumstances which surrounded me as I embarked on the trip.

In the last post I wrote about enhanced responsibility traveling against my parents’ full consent (to clarify, they supported me in my decision but if they had a say they would’ve completely shut the trip down until the entire virus situation tided over). It had been weighing over my head the entire trip and through my mom’s frequent check-ins that as much as I wanted this trip for myself, I’m not my own person. We all aren’t. I read an essay “No Patient is an Island” by Anita Ho on Aeon and it presented studies on moral philosophy such as Rene Descartes’s “rugged individualism” where the self is individualistic, independent and in autonomous control of their lives. This goes against the inherent significance of family relationships - that which is characterised by collectivity, non-consensuality, sensibility and favouritism.

While it may seem that the end goal is independence, coming into your own person, much of our identities and idea of self is constituted by our relations with others. Besides navigating the new cities I was visiting, I was also grappling with a sense of guilt almost for having my mother worry over me, but also a sense of subtle want for defiance - to maybe miss a text or two, get back to the airbnb real late one night - and prove that I can be on my own. It is weird to say this even now but when I hadn’t done that, eventually caved to the messages my amygdala was sending and made sure I kept to my itinerary, don’t do anything stupid, and to assure my mother that the train ride home takes only 15 minutes and the station’s still crowded so I wasn’t alone, I felt like I still wasn’t really being fully independent. Even though I literally was - alone.

To me the premise for the trip was mild, non-social activities. Visit a park, a museum, catch a theatre play, take train rides to explore architecture, nature, boutiques, local cafes. That sort of thing. I remember catching up with a friend a week or two ago and he frowned when I said I started my days early around 8am but I was back in the airbnb most nights by 8pm. He proceeded to ask me why hadn’t I gone to a bar. Lol. Why would I be in a bar? Nothing wrong with bars - I’m not insinuating that if I had gone to a bar any of the nights that would’ve been the last you heard of me. I was just perturbed as to why there seemed to be a “generic itinerary” everyone had to follow and me missing out on these overtly “I’m solo tripping I am my own person now” type activities meant I had an odd trip.

I guess where I’m getting at is it all boils down to who I am, maybe neurologically my anterior hippocampus might be average sized or even smaller, or biologically I have inherited the DNA that encoded the same over-protectiveness and social paranoias my mother has (chemically, her oxytocin levels has surged through 3 childbirths and hence socially, my sense of danger and worry has also been compromised). There are so many reasons as to why I choose the straight path most times and I don’t take much risks. Don’t get me started on my psychological flaws on fears of failure and subconscious need for social (including parental) acceptance 🙃. But it doesn’t mean it was a horrible trip!!!! (I finally got to the point).

When friends asked me how was my trip, I felt socially obligated to preface that it wasn’t that great - because globally we hadn’t known we were about to fight a pandemic together, and because when I got back my parents were more relieved than excited to hear my stories, and I was slightly ashamed of how cautious I was and at some points, downright fearful. But now I understand, that I hold my life to great regards in accordance to others, and I attain a sense of selfhood through my connection with others. I have my fair share of social anxieties, but by my own measures I can deem the trip a great one regardless. An old friend who reconnected on my birthday (and we got to talking about her experience on her own solo trip) said this:

yea it’s not easy but it’s memorable hahaha there’ll be something about this trip that will stay with u for life and it’s sth that will be difficult to put into words or explain to anyone... try and relax and enjoy yourself! afterall this opportunity definitely didn’t come easy. you’re brave enough to even take ur first step :)

At that moment when I read her message a wave of calm just came upon me and that birthday I gallery-hopped - V&A Museum, The National Gallery, Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern - and I spent what others might think was the most mundane birthday but to me, one of the best yet.

Will I go back to the UK alone again? Absolutely! Knowing all of the above doesn’t mean I’m okay with it and am set to just live like a hermit for the rest of my life. It means I have so much to work on and look forward to in growing myself more and more. This will (continue to be) on my own terms, that will also be considerate of the people I value and how I’ve been raised. It means communicating my fears and assurances for others better, and it means going against my amygdala sometimes and trying new things (that I would enjoy) to overcome irrational fears. I hope if you’ve read this far that you’ll also be patient with yourself to give yourself time to figure out why you feel/think in certain ways about certain things, and to understand that everyone is on their own path. I hope you’ll give yourself time for yourself, and not by social standards of what it should look like at this stage of your life, going through whatever it is you’re trying to figure out.

Regular blogging content that actually talks about what I’d done on the trip in the next few posts :>

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/glimpsing-a-world-beyond-human-extinction/

Glimpsing a world beyond human extinction

Stand on solid ground and look down at your feet. Go deeper – through the flesh and bones, deeper into the Earth. What’s down there? It’s hard to imagine, let alone visit – should you want to.

Writer and explorer Robert MacFarlane has been voyaging in this hidden world, going back in “deep time” to places measured in “millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years”.

Now, he has surfaced and is asking: “What will we leave behind when we are extinct?”

And he is telling us why we should care.

To MacFarlane, this image could be “an annunciation scene from Giotto”.

But look more closely – in fact, it’s an “avalanche of vehicles”.

He abseiled down into an abandoned Welsh slate mine where locals have been dumping wrecked cars for 40 years. He says: “We are not just shaping the surface, but shaping the depth.”

Will our future fossils just be “car-chives” like this, along with the inevitable strata of plastic, lethal nuclear waste, and the spines of millions of intensively farmed cows and pigs?

Or can we, as a species, start to do things better?

As a Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, inspires worldwide climate-breakdown protests, and Extinction Rebellion brings central London to a standstill, it seems a good time to be looking at what MacFarlane calls the “under-land”, and to be asking ourselves: “Will we be good ancestors?”

Ice, says MacFarlane, “holds incredible knowledge”. So, in 2016, after the warmest summer on record in the Arctic, he dropped down into a fissure in a melting glacier to learn lessons from it.

Shafts in the ice such as this one, in the Knud Rasmussen glacier on the east coast of Greenland, are called “moulin” (the French word for “mill”). They are formed when the ice thaws and meltwater bores its way in. Scientists now use them to measure how quickly the glaciers and the ice caps are thawing.

Entering through its mouth, MacFarlane dropped 60ft (18m). He had time to look around, to be astonished, before getting caught in the torrent of meltwater and giving the agreed signal to “get me… out of here”.

The deeper you go, the deeper the blue – and the older the ice. MacFarlane says: “As you drop down, you drop further back in time.” In a few minutes, he had travelled several hundred years.

“It felt like being inside a vast alien creature… a humming blue tube,” he says.

MacFarlane says he was “calm and serene” – before being spun out of control. “It was beautiful,” he says, “except when I was getting absolutely hammered by the meltwater stream, penduluming me out and smashing me back in.”

Climate change is making the glaciers retreat so quickly that, according to MacFarlane, locals in the tiny settlement of Kulusuk, in Greenland, now can’t hear when it “calves” – when vast pieces of it shear off. Not so long ago, this sporadic thunder used to be part of their soundscape.

MacFarlane says: “The sense of rapidity and change up there is enormous.”

He forms a globe with his hands, representing the Earth and its ice-covered poles, and says of rising sea levels: “At the moment, the fate of the ice is the fate of us.”

Image copyright Phil Coomes

Image caption Claire Marshall talks with Robert MacFarlane in Epping Forest

But it’s not, thankfully, a tale entirely about looming annihilation. MacFarlane says he didn’t have to travel far from his home, in Cambridge, to find a world “humming with mystery and miracle”.

In Epping Forest, I hear about his walks there with an ecologist who taught him about the “wood wide web”, a name given to the subterranean relationship between plants and fungi – also known as the “kingdom of the grey”.

Image copyright Phil Coomes

Image caption Robert MacFarlane explores an upturned tree in Epping Forest

He smiles at the softness of the spring beech leaves. “An extraordinary social network is happening just 20cm [8in] under our feet,” he says.

“Rather than a lot of individual trees, it is a community.

“Knowing this changes the ground you walk on.”

The human world wide web has existed for less than 30 years.

The roots of plants and fungi mycorrhizal have been communicating with and helping each other for 400 million.

It clearly works – fungi were the first organisms to return to the blast site around Hiroshima. They seem to be in no danger of going extinct.

MacFarlane believes that learning from the wood wide web, learning to “speak in spores”, could help save humans.

Image copyright Posiva Oy

Gaze down in to Onkalo, a nuclear fuel repository in Finland, designed to bury something that needs to be kept from humanity forever – nuclear waste.

Onkalo means “The Hiding Place.” Its chambers are being excavated 1,500ft below ground, inside 1.9-billion-year-old rock on the west coast of Finland.

Surely a deeply depressing place to visit? But MacFarlane says that he was “oddly and unexpectedly lifted”.

Radioactive waste can remain dangerous to humans for tens of thousands of years.

This structure will need to outlast the people building it – by millennia – perhaps even the species that designed it.

Image copyright Posiva Oy

MacFarlane says: “I went there expecting apocalypse, to be the darkest place that I had ever reached, where we put the worst we have ever made – but it was one of the most hopeful places I ever reached.”

“It was an example of cooperation and communication.

“It’s an incredibly complex task – the pyramids have only lasted 5,000 years.

“And there was a sort of success that was born of deep time thinking engineering, scientific expertise and community cooperation.

“The thinking that is being done at Onkalo is an example of how to be good ancestors.

“And that is a question we need to be asking ourselves all the time now.”

MacFarlane also met some of the denizens of the “invisible city” below Paris.

There are 200 miles of catacombs and quarries beneath the streets of the the French capital.

He spent three days navigating the labyrinth, sometimes having to turn his skull sideways to go “lizarding” forwards. It was the longest he had spent without sun or sky.

MacFarlane likens this sculpture to humanity’s current existential struggle with climate change.

“This figure is half stepping out of ancient stone and half into the air of the present, half caught between these two states, unable to advance or retreat,” he says.

Image copyright Robert MacFarlane

These are notebooks from a decade of underland exploration: words also written during the hunt for the origins of the universe in an ice laboratory beneath the Yorkshire moors, while deep in ancient mines in the Mendip Hills, mountaineering to a remote Arctic “cave-art” site in Norway, and descending to a “starless river” in the Slovenian highlands.

Having now shaped all this in to a book, called Underland, hasn’t he ended up wondering why we should bother caring about how we live? Humans will just die out soon anyway.

Image copyright Robert MacFarlane

No. MacFarlane believes that a deep time awareness should, at its best, “provoke us to action not apathy”.

It should help us, he says, “to see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us”.

Image copyright Robert MacFarlane

An artist carved this owl from the rib bone of a minke whale, washed up on a beach in the Hebrides.

He gave it to the writer on one condition – that he carry it with him as a talisman, to help him see in the dark.

Did it work?

“Yes,” he says, “in that I learned not just how to see in the dark but also to see the dark, as it were.”

And?

“We are a brilliant, terrible species.”

Photographs all subject to copyright.

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maddiviner · 7 years

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Hello everyone. I’m up late tonight, drinking coffee and writing. I hope you’re all having an excellent day, and that it gets even better. Today, I’ll be talking about color magick theory, and also providing some helpful techniques for incorporating it into your practices.

What is color magick?

I’ve written profusely in the past about the relationship between symbols, magick, and reality. I strive to emphasize that I believe witchcraft (and all magick) to operate via building connections between the individual (microcosm) and greater realities (the macrocosm). The use of symbols allows us to develop more intense connections of this sort. In a way, when we speak of magick, anything and everything can be seen as a symbol for even greater things.

Naturally, to facilitate this process, symbols must resonate, ideally both with the individual and with the whole of reality. Without a doubt, symbols need to evoke strong emotions and sentiments to be used for maximum efficaciousness. Colors, of course, are symbols, but I think we all knew that. Color, though, is more than just a simple symbol-set like many others.

Color is primordial - prior to writing, the invention of fire and civilization, even prior to the inception of language, there was color in the world, and humans experienced its richness.

Our shared experiences of life on this planet have led to a highly universal conception of color, as I’ll discuss in a moment. The omnipresence of color in our daily experiences make shades and hues extremely accessible symbols for many of us, and this is quite easy to use in witchcraft.

Naturally, we all have internal symbol-sets. I’ve written about exercises a witch can do to learn their personal correspondences for various things, and these work for color, as well. In addition to our personal associations for colors, though, there exist many codified systems of color correspondences, originating both from the occult world and from the rich traditions of art.

If you study these systems, you’ll find that they all vary, but there is a great degree of overlap, both between systems and between personal correspondences and cultural ones.

Relevant Historical Context

Associations for something as visceral and primal as color tend to develop organically. Early humans painted images of the animals they hunted in red ochre (one of the earliest paints). This is likely because they already associated red with the color of blood, and therefore with violence, the hunt, and bringing down the animal.

Similarly, humans have observed the continual growth and renewal plant life that exists alongside us for millennia, and many cultures and people inherently come to associate the green color of chlorophyll-rich plants with growth and development.

Probably associations like this have existed since before the invention of languages to talk about them. Later peoples assigned special value to colors that were rare in nature, such as the brilliant blue of the uncommon lapis lazuli gemstones. There are some popular authors who argue that humans only recently developed the ability to perceive these rare colors (like bright blue), but there’s little evidence to prove or disprove this theory.

Regardless, humans have always had various associations for color, and these correspondences naturally flowed through human culture, spreading into more and more minds.

While you of course can’t truly declare anything universal, you’ll find in studying color systems of various cultures that there is, in fact, a great degree of overlap, owing to our shared experiences as human beings. Traditions of color magick and fortunate colors have always existed, but alongside and overlapping them we also see the multifaceted world of artistic symbolism that has developed over the aeons.

The particular system of color theory I’d like to discuss today arises from what’s commonly called the Western Magical (or Mystery) Tradition, also known as the WMT. I am referring to the magical and mystical traditions that appeared over the centuries in the Western world, which were ultimately subject to a great degree of codification post-Enlightenment Era.

You may find separate, quite different systems of color symbolism in other magical and mystical traditions, and I do encourage you to investigate what your own path in particular says about color. Today, though, I’ll be focusing on a particular system of color magick associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

In case you’ve not heard of them, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a quasi-Masonic secret society that operated in Victorian London. Though of spurious origins, the texts associated with the Order were incredibly influential in the magical revival of the early 20th century. Though it’s difficult to trace the origins of many of the Order’s teachings, some of them have clear precedent in prior Hermetic philosophy, and, in particular, Hermetic Qabalah.

The color magick theory taught by the Golden Dawn was quite a vast and complex system. It was believed to have been developed from earlier approaches by Moina and S. L. Macgregor Mathers. No doubt some amount of unverifiable personal gnosis or inspiration played a part in setting up the color system, but that hardly invalidates it. It has endured in various forms as a central fixture of Western magical thought for over a hundred years, and I suspect will continue to be useful for centuries to come.

While the Mathers couple probably developed the system, it was popularized by the infamous Aleister Crowley, who incorporated it into his new system of Thelema and Thelemic Qabalah. This is most visible in his seminal work, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings, where he lays out the color correspondences in a series of arcane tables. Crowley was known to describe this system and related concepts as a sort of metaphysical filing cabinet, allowing him to connect separate concepts for use in magick.

The tables in 777, visible here, associate a series of colors (as well as many other concepts) with the Hermetic Qabalistic system of the Tree of Life, but also with the astrological concepts that most of us are familiar with, such as the seven classical planets and twelve signs of the zodiac. More than that, though, Crowley lists (drawing from Golden Dawn material) four separate colors associated with each concept, arranged into schemas he calls “scales.”

In the symbolic rendering of the Ten Holy Sephiroth in the Four Worlds there is another important set of factors to be considered, and these are the four colour scales classified by Crowley as the King scale, assigned to the Atziluthic World; the Queen scale, assigned to the Briatic World; the Emperor scale, assigned to the Yetziratic World; and the Empress scale, assigned to the Assiatic World.

Fortune, Dion. Mystical Qabalah (p. 40). RedWheelWeiser - A. Kindle Edition.

These scales are each associated with one of the four Qabalistic worlds, which in turn correspond to the four elements most of us are familiar with. It would be fair to say that, for any astrological and/or Qabalistic concept, Crowley provides four separate, distinct colors, each with a different elemental association. Naturally, the symbolism goes quite a bit deeper than that, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll be focusing on just those concepts.

The Scales Themselves

Kabalistically, there are four sets of colors (one for each of the four Kabalistic Worlds) that are related to the Sephiroht. They are named after the court cards of the Minor Arcana of the Tarot. In the Golden Dawn, initiates were expected to know all of the color scales. However, for our purposes, the most important version of the colors for the ten Sephiroht is called the Queen Scale (hence the “Q.S.”), which are the colors given here. The Queen Scale colors are associated with the world known as B’ri-yah. Traditionally it is believed that it is more important to become familiar with the Queen Scale sephirotic colors than with the other scales of color.

Kraig, Donald Michael. Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts (Kindle Locations 2774-2779). Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.. Kindle Edition.

The four scales called the King Scale, the Queen Scale, the Prince Scale, and the Princess scale, an obvious reference to the Tarot court cards, which in turn correspond to the four elements and many other concepts. The King Scale corresponds to Fire, the Queen Scale to Water, the Prince Scale to Air, and finally, the Princess Scale is associated with Earth. It really goes much deeper than this, but I suggest reading more about it on your own, as I can’t really explain the entire system of it here.

The King Scale, being associated with Fire, provides the essential color of the concept (such as a planet or sign). These are often described quite fancifully and are difficult to picture. That is by design - the idea is that the pure essence of a concept, such as Venus or Virgo, lies just beyond our grasp. Thus, these essences are associated with colors that often escape our eyesight.

The Queen Scale, though, is quite different. The colors listed for it tend to be easily visualized and conceptualized by us humans. It’s associated with the element of water, and the implication is that this element exists at a level easily grasped and understood. The Queen Scale represents concepts as they exist very close to our everyday reality.

For this reason, it is by far the most popular set of color correspondences used by witches, magicians, and pagans today. Even the silliest witchy book that derides Crowley as “evil” will probably list the Queen Scale correspondences culled from his book, 777. It’s truly ubiquitous in the magical world these days, which is fitting given its place within the system.

The Prince Scale is made of colors that merge those of the King and Queen, which makes a great degree of sense, and, as noted, it corresponds to the element of Air. For more information about the other scales, I recommend perusing 777 itself, but for now, I would recommend focusing on, an choosing colors from, the Queen Scale for most applications.

The Queen Scale is most strongly associated with the manifest universe, after all, and it makes sense to delve into it when trying to exercise your will in manifesting change in reality. You can, of course, combine the colors from the scales, or choose a particular scale based upon its associations (with, for example, an element), but the Queen Scale is usually the first scale you would learn or work with, either way.

When flipping through 777 or related sites, you’ve probably noticed, too, that they don’t resemble the “color magick” sections of modern witchcraft and occult books by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly the tables and scales have nothing in common with the long lists of purposes and associated colors found in many New Age books. Rather than sorting colors by magical intent, Crowley and his forebears assigned them to, as mentioned earlier, existing concepts in the Western Magical Tradition, such as the features of the Qabalistic Tree of Life.

These, in turn, are associated with other concepts such as astrological entities (Mars, Mercury, Virgo, etc.) and even more concrete symbols like Tarot cards. This complex interweaving of symbols and color creates, in my opinion, a much richer and more fascinating approach to magick than merely choosing a color from a list of intentions. Oddly enough, though, the books that do have long lists of intentions and colors paired with them usually draw heavily from 777 and the Queen Scale in particular.

For example, they will list “Green” for “Love Magick,” an obvious reference to earlier traditions of associating the color emerald with Venus and the sphere of Netzach, both associated with love.

I’m going to be brutally honest and say that it’s very difficult (borderline impossible) to fully use the Queen Scale without at least a basic or cursory understanding of at least some of the systems surrounding it. This means that, to get the most out of this particular color theory system, you should be somewhat familiar with Hermetic Qabalah and/or astrology.

Though I, personally, have studied Hermetic Qabalah a fair bit, prefer to look to the astrological associations of the colors when choosing to use them in ritual or spellcraft. This is probably because I’ve a bit of an obsession with the seven classical planets and celestial witchery in general.

Using the Queen Scale

So, how do you use the Queen Scale? Well, let’s suppose you want to do a ritual or spell to get better grades in school and learn more quickly. If you’re familiar with astrology, you know that the intellect, and in particular academics, tend to be governed by Mercury. You might also know that the sign of Virgo is associated with a highly-disciplined, fastidious nature, and is ruled by Mercury.

You might decide to incorporate the powers of both Mercury and Virgo into the spell or ritual. Turning to the Queen scale, you would see that Mercury is associated with the color orange, and Virgo is associated with slate gray. Thus, you would decide to somehow use those colors in your spell to earn better grades. There are many different ways of incorporating colors into spellcraft. I’ll discuss them in detail in the second article in this series, which will focus exclusively on practical techniques.

Now, I’ve said over and over that if a symbol (of any sort) doesn’t resonate with you, choose another one. This is true even if books like 777 are telling you the symbol (in this case, a color) has a certain association. If the association isn’t present and strong in your mind, your magick will be somewhat weakened.

The connection between the symbol and what it represents will be weak. Thus, it’s perfectly, 100% acceptable and definitely awesome if you just want to ignore things like the Queen Scale and create your own personalized scale of color, as many witches do. I’ve written up an exercise for finding your own symbolic correspondences, and it can easily work with a color as the given symbol.

Another option, though, is to build an association in your mind where previously there was none. I personally refer to this process as charging a symbol (in this case, a color). In the above example, perhaps you don’t associate orange, personally, with the intellect, but would like to build that correspondence for practical purposes. In that case, you might begin by researching the history of orange as a color and it’s associations with the intellect, seeking to find a reason for the association. This will help you to solidify the connection between the two in your mind.

You might also engage in creative visualization or other techniques to associate the color with the concept. I’ve personally found that just immersing myself in the literature of the Western Magical Tradition has helped me to familiarize myself with the traditional associations and build strong mental connections with them. Nowadays, I use them regularly.

I hope you found this introduction to color magick theory interesting and informative. I’ll soon be posting the second half of this series, which focuses solely on practical spellcraft techniques and using color to get the most out of magick. You’ll find that, and any other related color magick tidbits, in my #color+magick tag shortly.

I want to emphasize before ending this article, though, that just because the Queen Scale and related systems are old and very complex doesn’t make them an objective standard, and there’s much to be said for innovation. You might find traditional color correspondences useful, or you might want to create your own! Either way is fine, and I hope you enjoy exploring the colorful world of magick!

#magick #witchcraft #witch #occult #thelema #color magick #eliza.txt #symbolism #spellcraft #theory #gif

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I’ve Got Love Falling Like the Rain, I Never Could’ve Asked for More | 05.10.2019 | Firkle and Craig |

It was almost like his whole life was leading up to this moment, after going into an immense amount of details about why his congregation found the summoning of the deities to be of the upmost importance, hours of telling the tales of the men that weren’t holy going mad trying to summon the gods, and sequentially ending their own lives out of pure madness. The stories were morbid, but they filled the goth with a sense of nostalgia, he’s been hearing about them since he was four years of old at the latest. One of his favorite stories was about the man that wrote the Necronomicon, the field journal of Consequences. The man thought he was the one who could finally understand the Eldritch, but to understand the Eldritch was to understand insanity, which fueled his descent into madness towards the end of the book, the ramblings of a madman, and yet so endearing to Firkle. The poor, pathetic, uneducated man, risking his essence to understand what can’t be understood.

It lead to countless advances into understanding how to summon the romanticized creatures, events that came into fruition. The stories were what the goth held most dear, and the cosmic mysteries they entailed kept his constantly enthralled in his own religion. If he couldn’t summon the gods and feel them with his fingers, he wouldn’t believe in them, and ever since the day when he was 13, when he saw them with his own soul in the deepest, coldest bits of space, he’s been devout since his birth, but that solidified that this was what he was meant to do with his life. Tonight was a testing night, one Firkle was meant to do a demonstration at, so naturally, he wasn’t going to change the dates on. Instead, they were brought in Firkle’s mom’s car, one of the few light sources the dogs were trained not to attack on sight. Miles outside of town, the goth’s mom was silent, her son and Craig in the backseat. Coming up to a once abandoned school that the church bought. Though the banks declared it condemned, it was renovated and fixed, and parents paid to have their children taught their normal lessons here during the day. To many parents, it was a regular private school, but to the cult, it was a training ground, and a source of bountiful income.

The private location brought a need for the large brick building to the right, it was the dormitories, and when the classes here have ended for the term, the Starry Wisdom cult classes are started for the church’s kids. The children turning thirteen this year were going to be tested, and if they failed, they would have to take remedial classes. The goth’s job was to partake in a ritual, though he didn’t have to do any talking to students, he was going to be in a lecture hall, being critiqued. He was one of the example members, a child of a high ranking member, that’s been trained very young.

Bringing Craig inside, of course, his mother wasn’t coming in, she wasn’t needed here, they were careful not to loiter on sacred grounds if they weren’t necessary there. All in all, it was a beautiful building, dark brick, lovely arches, massive stained glass windows. It was a staple of the church, to have eyes on their stained glass windows. “This is the School of Yomagn'tho,” his voice came out sweet, almost affectionate when he spoke the name. “He is known as the One Who Restlessly Waits Outside, and he wishes for nothing short of the destruction of mankind.” For such harsh words, his voice remained light, almost dreamy. Firkle was for one, very fond of the idea of humanity coming to extinction, but that wasn’t for this conversation. Leading the other male down the long hallways, passing the clusters of students in white, a contrast between the goth’s almost imposing black robe. The fresh faced kids in white robes, running about in their cloaks, made it quite obvious that they were all in plain white cotton shirts and shorts under the cloaks. No one wanted to risk the kids catching colds being nearly naked.

Not to mention, Firkle had caught more than his fair share of them, and he had much more than his fair share of information. It’s been years since he had to sit in one of the classrooms, but he could practically teach the material, which wasn’t too far from what they were going to be doing today. Stopping by the door of the room they were going to be in, the goth waiting for the kids to file in first, Firkle holds Craig’s hands in his. “If you stop liking what you see, you can always look into your hands, though since you really wanted to know what’s going on, I wouldn’t recommend looking away. Just always remember ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.’And remember that the Lords cannot enter your dreams at night unless you let them.” Was there anything he said that wasn’t entirely cryptic? Not when talking about his church. “If you find what you’ve learned haunting you, just whisper ‘go away’, and it will. You can always shut them off.”

Despite the pit in his stomach, spreading from the feeling that saying this was disrespecting his gods, but as Yog-Sothoth knows all there is, has been, and will be, Firkle felt that the best way to respect him was to share the most basic information his own mother taught him, before he grew to love and be emotionally fulfilled by the nightmares of torn limbs. “Also do not be alarmed when you see Groth. It’s not his fault he’s nothing but an eye.” His words, though soft, seemed to almost echo in the halls, it was silent, almost time to begin, but he felt the final warnings were important. The goth was excited beyond compare that the object of his affection had so much interest in what he was up to at night, he had a creeping sensation that it was a bad idea. Since he still had the intentions to date Craig. “At any time, if you don’t feel safe, just think to yourself about Nyarlathotep, he’s the most human of the gods, and he is whom I’m named for, and he’ll protect you for me. I promise. He’s said to have over two-thousand forms, but his most famous form is an Egyptian Pharoh.” Pressing a soft, quick kiss to the other’s lips. “Are you ready?”

@legomycrego

#; thread #; craig

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