#ensifera path

[mordcore]

some rules i go by as a witch who has had delusions & miiight have scrupulosity ocd:

- if it makes me panic and doubt my perception of reality, i don't do it. for me this includes any "intuitive" communication with deities, spirits etc. i set strict boundaries on what and when i'm open to being communicated with and refuse to receive messages outside of that. don't call me outside of work hours /lh

- if it makes me feel guilty and like i'm wrong or bad somehow, i don't do it. or, i try to deal with the feelings and find ways around them. this one is hard because it comes up so much, but religion is supposed to be good for me, not bad, so i want to find a way where it doesn't stress me out more than it brings me joy/peace/comfort/whatever.

- whatever entities, mythologies or general ideas i work with need to be understanding of mental illness and disability. things aren't gonna work for me like they do for others. loki understands this, therefore i can work with loki. chaos magic makes a lot of room for this, therefore i can do chaos magic. anything too rigid or judgemental is off the table.

- not letting other people tell me what to do or think. i already struggle enough with self-imposed rules and insecurities, i don't need other people adding to that. a lot of witches one can meet online and offline tend to be judgemental and superior of anyone they deem lacking confidence or whatever, but these people are generally toxic to be around and are best avoided. their opinion on your practice doesn't matter half as much as they think.

just saw a tiktok clip of a person saying "intrusive thoughts are just your intuition!" I need sane people to like. stop. y'all need to stop taking terms like delusions and intrusive thoughts & using them wrong AND saying shit that is going to make people with actual intrusive thoughts extremely distressed & misled. stop it!!!!!!

[mordcore]

🔥 = 🔪 (🍴🪚✒️✂️🗡️)

🌪️ = 🐦‍⬛ (🪽🪶)

🌊 = 👁️‍🗨️

🪨 = 💀?

[mordcore]

it's really hard to find anything if you can't read but it seems like numerology as a chifre system really does go back to the ancient greeks and pythogoras but the numbers 1-9 with meanings probably actually comes from english kaballah which surprised me like damn ok

i've been using thoth tarot for years and it's interesting to learn a bit more about what those cards mean in relation to kabalah but i'm not sure i super wanna get into that

i watched an interview on the one academic channel i know about esoteric stuff and apparently it's part of the belief that names have power and you need to be careful and i. yeah my ocd doesnt like that at all.

anyway i had a really fun idea for a number meanings system for my own tarot thing

why not just base it on my synesthesia. the numbers 0-9 all have very distinct colors. i can even come up with those meanings on my own. this might just work!

[mordcore]

i love that this has forced me to finally sit down and work out the four elements meanings btw

i have cancluded that at its core it's this:

earth: matter

fire: movement

water: inner meaning

air: big picture meaning

i might still change my mind later (and i wish i could find what i wrote about this when i was 14) but for now this is incredibly helpful as i set out to design a tarot deck

[mordcore]

i made my own post about it but i wanted to show off what you made me start /pos

[short ID: 3 times 7 cards from thoth tarot, all have washi tape glued on them and words written on in sharpie. end ID]

my cards have never been better

hello! another little question on tarot if i may.

when i read more casually my readings were usually very relaxed and with simple meanings, accurate with by the book meanings but not super specific. as i become more ambitious i became super motivated to learn all the nuance i possibly can, its an interesting journey but.. doesnt seem to work in practice. i always knew it but everyone and their mama will always have interpretations that can seem stupid to others, even among experts in the field. question is how do you deal with that?

Im seeing that as my study deepens and Im working with Apollo to achieve that, some interpratations that are organically coming up and rooting themselves in my practice can seem just straight up weird to some people. how do i deal with that? have you experienced that? everyone seems so Agressive about their interpretations being the proper ones.

Listen to me.

Listen to me.

You must engage in the most batshit methods of reading tarot. You must design your own systems of reading with all the glee of a young boy throwing rocks off an overpass. You must read tarot so bizarrely that it makes you feel like a mad scientist.

You must decide for yourself every rule and ritual which makes tarot "work," and you must develop methods of reading that hinge upon destroying those ideations. You must make vehicles of meaning, drive them as fast as you can down the freeway of tarot, and crash them at full speed into brick walls. You must laugh at the fiery destruction you have wrought, and you must sprint all the way back to the launch pad to begin building something else.

They will be Aggressive with you over what the cards really mean? They are fools. They do not know the depths to which you can tear apart their petty systems. They think the extent of tarot perversion is choosing the wrong meaning for the card. They think this because they have mistaken the surface of the water for the depths of the ocean.

They think the height of tarot discourse is whether or not it's okay to not memorize card meanings. They think tarot is a pretty sea turtle languidly drifting in a sunny reef.

Go down in that ocean and dredge up the most horrifying bulbous-eyed god-defying pale abomination you can find. Map out new depths of horror. Make friends with the purely absurd. Perform atrocities with tarot and hang each one around your neck like the badge of honor it is. Crack tarot's spine and drink from the fluid that drips out. Become a monster, do you hear me?

And when they smirk at you because they think they know better words to tape to the Knight of Swords, you will open your mouth and say the most dumbfounding shit that person has ever heard and blast them with a ray of psychic damage so severe it will make them question if they should keep reading tarot lest they be associated with someone like you.

"Well akshually, knight cards do the queen's bidding, so in this case-"

"Haha, yeah! Once for a couple of months I worked exclusively with a system where the four knights were the rulers of the deck. I divided up the major arcana cards between the knights as their servants, but since there's one card left over, I incorporated a system where one of the four knights was the 'ruler' of that reading. Then I laid out all four knights as signifiers and dealt the entire deck between all four knights and the reading was based on which omens were collected under the ruling knight."

"Haha, yeah! Once for like two weeks I assigned all the court cards to be my favorite anime blorbos and I read from a restricted deck that only used court cards and major arcana. I'd draw one major arcana card to be the battlefield setting and then two court cards. To resolve the reading I wrote fanfiction about the characters fighting and whichever character won would decide the outcome of the question. It's actually how I got started using creative writing as a form of exploratory divination!"

"Haha, yeah! One weekend I decided to find out what would happen if I read in such a way that sword cards could 'kill' other cards in the deck, and the Knight of Pentacles ended up getting 'killed' like three times that weekend and ever since then it's always coming up in readings about sadness and depression, isn't that weird?"

"Haha, yeah! Well today I'm reading with a system where I meditate until a recurring character from my dreams appears and asks me to possess one of my tarot cards, and today No-Eyes the Whale asked to possess that knight card, so that's why I'm not using your meanings."

Do they challenge you? They cannot challenge you. Are you not shuffling right? Are you getting scolded for not fOcUsInG enough when you shuffle? Look them in the eye and say something so deranged they will think about it for the rest of their life.

"Haha, yeah! I remember the last time I used those meanings, it was so fun. I got drunk, shuffled my tarot deck, and laid out piles of three cards around my house, sight-unseen. For the next three days I kept running into these little three-card readings hidden everywhere, but funnily enough, they all ended up being past-present-future readings of the ten second timespan when I picked up the cards. I even predicted getting the phone call about losing my health insurance!"

"Haha, yeah! I actually decided to re-assign every single card to my custom twelve element system, so I don't see the same divisions between the suits as you do. Look, this card is the element pearl! Pearls are an element, I decided a couple of months ago. It's a really long story but it helps explain what happened to No-Eyes."

"Haha, yeah! I don't use intuition to choose cards out of a lineup. I turn them all face up and select all the cards that I think are the most likely ones to show up in the reading. Then, I go through the entire deck and match every single card with it's polar opposite. Then, I put the deck face-down and flip cards over. If I flip over a sword or a wand card, I exchange my chosen card with its opposite, but if it's a major arcana card I keep both my chosen card and its opposite."

"Haha, yeah! I don't shuffle. Like, at all. Once I'm done with the reading I put cards on the bottom of the deck and then just draw new cards from the top of the deck."

"Haha, yeah! I mixed all my decks together and sorted the superdeck into piles of every elementally aligned card. In order to resolve questions I have a yu-gi-oh duel with myself."

Eat the tarot. Consume it whole and raw. Tear away at it until you fear there is nothing left, and then go back for more. Each time you eat its heart, it will become refined before your eyes. Assist the tarot in shedding its decrepit cloak of meaning. Rescue it by killing it. Rend tarot in your hands like a child ripping at crafting clay.

And if you destroy it well enough, and for long enough, it will be reborn in your hands as it was meant to be: glimmering and pure, whole and new, ineffable and eternal, your dearest friend,

and so shiny and smooth that no meanings at all can stick to it.

That is what you do with people who get Aggressive about what the cards really mean.

[mordcore]

i'm starting to think it's not an empath ability but a clairvoyance one. i have to change my header again huh

[mordcore]

readnig about chaos magic now

i think i agree with 80% of it. maybe more, perhaps wikipedia just paraphrased stuff badly.

i don't think (my) magic comes from the unconscious mind or whatever. i don't need to bypass the consious mind. what i do need is

a) systems of meaning, some kind of (potentially arbitrary and temporary) rule of what does and doesn't count as casting a spell on a given day

b) connection to my gut feeling. i need to be in touch with what feels *right* and what doesn't. that's like the most important part, and also what helps me decide the systems of meaning in a). i do need to bypass something, but not the conscious mind, just the rationalizing/overthinking/skeptical one.

[mordcore]

what if... noble gasses.......

[mordcore]

hmm. ok you know what? i refuse to try to force myself to read writings about chaos magic that are hard to understand. either write accessibly or be ignored. i don't have the spoons for this.

it's frustrating to be a disabled chaos witch though because guess what most writing reads like :/ im SURE this could be dumbed down. idk. at least some of these writers give off the vibe that they'd prefer their texts stay elitist and inaccessible.

also sometimes people who uso too many big words and too long sentences don't actually have anything to say. not that i'd know for sure as i cannot parse them but that is totally a thing that happens.

[mordcore]

put out some tarot cards for the first talf of next year.

the good news: it says i'll have energy in april (i knew it!)

the bad news: it'll be an overall sucky year just like this one

not awful just. UGH. that's what the cards said.

[mordcore]

tea leaf reading is so fucking cool

i just saw. a dragon. an eastern noodly dragon with a bell on it's tail. and the leaf discard pile on my saucer made a hermit (like the tarot card) but only if viewed from the side at eye level.

i'm still working on what that means for my question and i'm excited to research both concepts actually

[mordcore]

oh yeah did i mention? i finally got around to ward my home! last year actually. made up a complex symbol for it, drew it 5 times on little papers and put those papers on the 4 corners of the house and the fifth on the door.

and i replaced them after a year when a couple of moves happened. replacing them once a year sounds reasonable. i'd had the idea of checking every full moon or something but who has the spoons for that.

[mordcore]

im getting really into vedic astrology. spending all day calculating my shadbala level hyperfixation. it doesn't quite matter if it's true or not, i just love how complex it is and i need to learn it 💪

[mordcore]

i think with the colors i'm just gonna have to be spontaneous. let the art process guide me. i've been overthinking the court cards real hard so this is how i'll balance it i guess! i'll just get a ton of images of crows from near and far doing all kinds of things

and maybe i'll get colorful images of crows also. and then i'll just print them and turn them into cards!!!

it's probably a good idea to focus on one element first to not get too muddled. i changed the core meaning of air to "how it all connects", btw. more accurate that way

[mordcore]

the difficult part about making my own tarot deck from 0 is that

how to decide the meanings for all the number suit cards???? i have high standards for completeness and cohesion and i don't know how to meet them

the upside is that i have a reason to learn about the history of numerology now and the history of the cultural appropriation of the kaballah too while i'm at it. these are systems that might help or have been used for this kind of task and i need to know more about them now