warm-like-fire - Tumblr blog

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a concerning amount of witchblr will be like "um actually new years was stolen by europeans from the ancient god scroobus mcdoobus" and then you actually try to research scroobus mcdoobus and it turns out he was invented in the 1940s by a conspiracy theorist who powdered every meal with ketamine and thinks that queer people are reincarnated fish

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The idea of setting up an altar/making offerings to the unknown/undocumented gods is so underrated and tbh seems like a really neat concept for deity/spirit workers who want to traverse some uncharted territory.

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By the light of Apollo may you be blessed

That reason find you and guide you

That your body be healthy

And your mind nimble

By the touch of Apollo may you be blessed

That your hands work magic on the strings of that instrument

And your mind run full with imagination

And your desire to create never diminish

By the will of Apollo may you be blessed

That your heart remain open to the muses

Who dance and sing to his music

As I hope you do too

Art: By Cody escouade delta - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73724619

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Hades & Persephone worshippers: Research boost

[I'm sharing this call for survey participant with permission.]

Transcript

Are you a Hellenic polytheist who worships Persephone and/or Hades? If so, I’d like to invite you to participate in a research project that will look at how Hellenic Polytheists engage with ancient evidence. Participation will be via an online survey that will take 15-30 minutes and include a series of questions about your interests and your religious practice and ask you to undertake three interpretation tasks. Participation in voluntary, and you can contact me for more information at ellie.mackinroberts(@)bristol.ac.uk. Link: https://arts.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/dread-persephone-and-lord-hades Why am I doing this study? I’m doing this study to try and understand how modern Hellenic Polytheists interpret and engage with ancient source material, and how their understanding of the ancient contexts adds to this interpretation. My hope is to draw some conclusions about how professional ancient historians may be able to assist in the informed research of Hellenic polytheists.

Further context

Dr Ellie Mackin Roberts has been active in academia for a while and some of you may know some of her work, the most notable and recent of which being Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion: Death and Reciprocity, which was her PhD thesis. Others may also know her since she is active on TikTok.

If you are looking for information as to the context of this particular survey and how the information will be used, you can find some info on the survey itself: https://arts.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/dread-persephone-and-lord-hades as well as on her blogpost https://elliemackinroberts.net/2023/08/30/my-first-survey/ but the TL;DR is that she is currently writing a chapter for an upcoming book titled Persephone in Love: Persephone and Hades in Popular Culture in which she intends to study how modern worshippers of Persephone and Hades approach ancient sources.

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@micromeria you might already know about this, but thought I'd tag you in case this wasn't the case.

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The Agora Drought, dated in eighth century B.C. : This drought was the reason that many shrines were built up, dedicated to Omvrios (rainy) Zeus, at different places in eastern Greece, e.g., at Aegina island, at Acropolis, at the eastern slopes of Hymettus mountain (east of Athens) and elsewhere. During this drought period, the Athenians addressed a prayer to Zeus: “Yσoν Yσoνωφίλε Ζευ, κατά της Αρoύρης των Αθηναίων και των πεδίων…”, i.e., “Rain, rain dear Zeus on the Earth of the Athenians and the plains…”

-Mariolakos, Ilias D. (2017) Ancient Greece and Water: Climatic Changes, Extreme Events, Water Management, and Rivers in Ancient Greece.

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People travel to India and China to "find themselves", convert to neo-pagan religions filled with stolen deities and traditions, wave around "smudge sticks" and go on "vision quests", all in an attempt to find some sort of cultural connection and spiritual meaning in the gaping void that colonialism and white supremacy left in them.

And they always fucking fail because they're looking for meaning in other people's lives, other people's cultures, other people's heritages. They try to build connections with things that they don't understand, that hold no personal meaning to them, and it shows in how shallow their own interactions with those traditions end up being. They cover themselves in hamsas and worship Lilith and Amaterasu-Omikami in the same altar and give themselves "spirit names" and they just keep looking and they just keep taking because none of it feels right and none of it fulfills them the way they desperately want.

And I feel bad for them because it does fucking suck to feel that way and to feel so incomplete, but it's hard to hold onto that sympathy when they just keep approaching things with the same colonalist entitlement and ignorance and they refuse to understand that that is part of the problem.

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That grey-sorcery guy was the person who listed syncretism as a “new age practice that you need to unlearn to de-colonize” by the way and boy do I have some historical information for you.

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Ways To Be A Garbage Witch

Look everyone, in These Trying Times we can't always afford things so we gotta make do with what we got. So here's some hot tips to help you become a garbage witch:

Save and use apple seeds, orange seeds, peach pits, cherry pits, etc. to use in your spells.

Make a spirit board/pendulum board out of an empty cardboard box.

Make drawstring pouches out of old clothes.

Use bag strings for binding magic or use them in small drawstring bags.

Shoelaces and drawstrings from old pajamas or sweatpants are fine for knot magic or turning into drawstrings for pouches.

Save glass jars for spell jars.

Study carrion animals, animals that eat garbage, fungus, and the process of decomposition in general. Learn about the importance of biodiversity, and the hazards of oversterilization.

But also study proper sanitation methods, and be aware of biohazards. Don't go living in a house fulla mold or fish through people's garbage for... uhhh... ummm... taglocks. Don't store chicken bones so they'll rot.

If you have a compost bin, write anything you want to "decompose" out of your life on a banana peel. Put the banana peel in the bin.

Learn how to repair broken stuff. (But also learn what you really shouldn't repair for yourself - EG, microwaves - lest you meet with a horrible fate.)

Make charms/talismans by cutting out pictures of things that correspond with your intent and decoupaging them onto wood, chipboard, or layered cardboard.

Make paper mache diety art/statues out of newspaper.

Learn more about crafting with scraps, packaging materials, old magazines, etc. (There's many videos on YouTube!)

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hi CT, unsure if this has been asked before (likely) but im gonna shoot. what is the actual historical origin of witches/witchcraft? especially in the sense of the term itself, but also whatever folk practice it may have come to refer to. it's so hard to get a straight answer about this because, well, you know.

Witchcraft isn't really a historical thing at all. What people consider witchcraft is the result of a big ball of things that the Catholic church declared to be Not Allowed.

In the late 1700s there was a renewed interest in pre-christian European folklore, and it kinda snowballed into coinciding with the rise of Spiritualism. Around the 1850s, you had this romanticization of an imagined pre-christian past. You can see a lot of this st that shows up in stuff like the poetry of W.B. Yeats.

In the 1920s you get Margaret Murray and her (entirely debunked) theory that "Witchcraft" was a actually a unified secret religion that survived the witch burnings of the late medieval era.

Then in 1954 a retired Rosicrucian named Gerald Gardener basically said "we should treat that as real and make a religion around it." And then he did that.

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Sorry to break it to y'all but believing in anything, participating in anything, has the capacity to harm people. There's no perfect system of belief that exempts you from having to continually work to not be an asshole.

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this might be a dumb question, but with the attic calendar, is it better to change the calendar to start on the southern hemisphere's summer solstice if thats where you live? i'm pretty sure there are season specific festivals and wondering if this would be all messed up with the opposite seasons if i was to go by the northern hemisphere? any thoughts are much appreciated!!

I would switch it around, yes. The attic calendar is very tied to what used to be the agricultural and astronomical events of the year (eg. heliacal rising of the Pleiades or of Sirius) but at the end of the day it's a matter of what you prefer to prioritize (seasonality vs. community if you feel like being out of sync with others is a problem for you). You can also go for a hybrid approach depending on what makes most sense for individual festivals.

Because I live in the Northerm Hemisphere myself, I don't feel like I'm best placed to advise on practicalities, but @verdantlyviolet and @piristephes are in the Southern Hemisphere (amongst others!) so you might want to check out how they've dealt with this.

Hope this helps!

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freckled

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https://www.academia.edu/41952649/Classical_Reception_in_a_New_Key_Contemporary_Hellenic_Polytheism_in_Modern_Greece?email_work_card=view-paper

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Invoking Demeter

As part of my ongoing project of composing singable versions of invocations and hymns, I just published the Invocation to Demeter.

My idea is to write short, easy to memorise songs in Ancient Greek.

This is a fully amateur project, one I'm doing out of love for my gods. Please support the project by reblogging it and spreading these songs with hellenics and pagans you know!

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God the Eleusinian mysteries sound like so much fun. Party and pray until you're high with exhaustion and then [REDACTED] in the Telesterion until you're not afraid of death anymore.

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