yarrowthewitch

[yarrowthewitch]

Strength. Art by Cedar McCloud, from The Magic Pantry Tarot.

▪ Bravery ▪ Protection ▪ Resilience ▪ Acceptance What is it that you fear? Whatever it is, take it and imagine that it is inside the walnut in this card. Then take the nutcracker of you mind, and CRUNCH! Bravery is not the absence of fear, but rather an assertion through action and/or words that we will not be controlled by them. How might you face yours? The hard outer shell protects the delicious, edible insides of the nut. This card may be asking you to think about how you do or don’t protect yourself from harm. Are your walls too thick? Too thin? Nonexistent? What is it inside of you that you’re trying to keep safe, and why? Once off the tree, whether in the shell or released and roasted, nuts can be stored for a very long time without going bad. This card may come up when resilience in the face of pain or difficulty is present or needed—or unnecessary. Don’t forget that just because you can endure suffering, that doesn’t mean you have to. Some nuts just won’t crack no matter how many times you try. It’s important that, as we face fear and pain, we accept that these things are always going to be a part of our lives. This card may be asking you to accept your fears without judging yourself as a person for having them. Accepting fear and pain can be a big step toward lessening their rule over our lives.

[yarrowthewitch]

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

[yarrowthewitch]

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

Expand on that, king (genuinely curious)

I feel like…

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

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

Like.

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

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

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

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

So, IMO- It’s not real. But it works

If that makes sense

[yarrowthewitch]

spent way too much time on this for a vent piece

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ oh well

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[yarrowthewitch]

More tea leaf divination knowledge. Take notes.

[yarrowthewitch]

I am once again asking goyim to stop worshiping the literal "rape and SIDS" demon. There is no reason for you to worship the rape and SIDS demon. She does not need to be worshiped. She is not a feminist icon. She's not even from your own heritage – in fact, chances are that everything you're doing relating to her is cultural appropriation. And also, not to put too fine a point on this – she is very specifically a rape and SIDS demon, who in Jewish folklore is specifically responsible for, uh, you guessed it, rape, and also SIDS. Why do you want to worship the rape and SIDS demon? Why is this so profoundly important to you? Are you really that spiritually committed to celebrating rape and/or SIDS? If so, why? Please stop.

[yarrowthewitch]

I understand that vaccines are proven to work and are a great advancement in our medicine, and also that homeopathic remedies don't work, but don't they work on the same principal? Why does one work and the other doesnt?

They do not work on the same principle.

I can see how vaccines look like a "like treats like" situation, but in homeopathy "like treats like" is a kind of magical thinking.

Let's take an example from Chicken Pox, a virus for which there is an effective vaccine and for which there is a common homeopathic treatment.

Chicken pox infects people once, and it is extremely rare to get a second case because once you have had it, your body forms persistent antibodies against the varicella-zoster virus. When I was a kid, they didn't have a vaccine for this, so kids mostly got chicken pox once and it ran around whole schools and that was it. It's a virus that is fairly minor in children, though it can cause dangerously high fevers. Adults who get chicken pox typically get much sicker than children who get it, and it can lead to permanent harms like infertility in adults who get it. Because it can be so dangerous, we don't want people to risk getting it, so we vaccinate.

The way the vaccine works is that it takes a weakened form of the virus and introduces that into the body of a person with a healthy immune system. The immune system responds and the person who got the vaccine may get some minor symptoms, like a headache or a slight fever, but it will be nowhere near as severe as getting actual chicken pox would be. Because the immune system was exposed to the virus and responded, it now has antibodies against the virus that recognize the virus and respond immediately before it can start replicating in the body. If a person who has either previously had chicken pox or who has been vaccinated against it is exposed to the chicken pox virus, their body uses those antibodies to react to the virus and protect against a systemic infection.

Are you familiar with Star Trek? It's kind of like the Borg. You can't use the same attack pattern against the Borg multiple times because if you do, they'll recognize the pattern and will be able to defend against it. The virus is the attacker, and your immune system is the Borg. It knows what it's looking for and won't let anything get through its defenses.

Homeopathic remedies don't seek to prevent illness or provoke an immune response, they seek to cancel out something that is happening in the body.

For chicken pox, which produces itchy red bumps, homeopaths use Rhus Tox - a dilution of poison ivy, a plant that causes itchy red bumps if you encounter it in nature. The Rhus Tox didn't cause the chicken pox, it's not given to prevent the virus, it's from a plant that is completely unrelated to the virus that happens to produce some of the same symptoms as the virus when you touch it.

They don't even think that the Rhus Tox will provoke an immune response from your body like actually touching poison ivy would, they're attempting to use an unrelated compound (that is so diluted that it isn't even present in the preparation) in place of your immune system to attack the itchy red bumps.

So I'm going to go over this in a few brief points:

Vaccines are preventative ONLY, they are not a treatment for illness or symptoms of an illness

Vaccines work by introducing your immune system to a partial, weakened, or dead virus so that your immune system can form antibodies against that virus and prevent that virus from replicating in your body when it is later exposed to a whole/strong/live virus.

Different vaccines have different levels of effectiveness and produce different lengths of immunity; this is for a number of reasons, but if you get a measles shot as a kid you may only ever need one booster, while you need a flu shot every year and a tetanus shot every decade. All of them work the same way, though: they show your immune system what a virus looks like so that your immune system can kill the virus.

That is why immune compromised people sometimes can't be vaccinated, or why vaccines don't work as well for them or may need higher doses or more boosters. Because they don't have a healthy immune system, weakened viruses like the ones in the chickenpox virus might be too strong for their immune system to fight, and even if it doesn't get them sick, their bodies may not be able to produce enough effective antibodies to protect them from the virus in the future. That's part of why it's important for as many people to be vaccinated as possible; the more people who are vaccinated, the harder it is for viruses to spread, and vulnerable people like immune compromised people or babies too young for vaccination won't be exposed to deadly viruses.

Homeopathy, on the other hand, aims to treat symptoms of an illness that a person is already experiencing.

Homeopathic treatments do not aim to provoke an immune response, they aim to cancel out a symptom with a cure.

Dilution is a very important part of homeopathy, with homeopaths claiming that the more diluted a preparation is the stronger it is. This is simply incorrect; I don't know how to make a more logical explanation of that, it is just wrong that less of a substance causes more of a response.

Homeopathy says "like treats like" and that may seem like using a vaccine with a weak virus to prevent infection from a strong virus, but their version of "like" is different - Rhus Tox (poison ivy) is supposed to be "like" chicken pox because both cause itching. Rhus tox is also supposed to treat PCOS, erectile dysfunction, uterine prolapse, sunken eyes, nausea, and backache. "Like" can have an extremely broad meaning in homeopathy, which should be cause for suspicion.

Here's a paper that compared the immune response of college students given homeopathic "vaccines" against a control group and against a group of students who were given standard medical vaccines. The control group and the homeopathic group both did not have an immune response in titer tests, while the vaccination group did have an immune response, demonstrating that they had protection from the vaccinated viruses. It's a pretty good demonstration both of how effective homeopathy is (not at all) as well as how to set up a fair and ethical study to look at the effectiveness of different kinds of treatments.

[yarrowthewitch]

[yarrowthewitch]

just felt like drawing Dionysus

[yarrowthewitch]

Johan Tobias Sergel, 1740-1814

Ceres searching for Proserpina,ca. 1780s, plaster

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden Inv. NMSk 457

[yarrowthewitch]

Oh no. What's wrong with Silver Ravenwolf? I feel like I see them recommended everywhere...

Yeeeeaaaah, it's an ongoing problem. Her books were wildly popular for over a decade and they're were widely marketed as THE Book To Have for beginner witches by Llewellyn, which was the heaviest of the heavy hitters in occult literature at the time.

The problem with Silver Ravenwolf is largely that she is wildly out of touch in a very New Age White Woman kind of way. Her books tout loads of misinformation, appropriation, and historical revisionism that are simply not acceptable (i.e. claiming victims of witch trials were actual pagan witches, citing a fictional ancient matriarchal goddess religion that never existed was the basis for Wicca, leaning into the hereditary superpowers / indigo child / starseed narrative, etc). Besides which, the theories she posits contradict each other from page to page and chapter to chapter, claims a Gardnerian lineage which can’t possibly exist, and trumpets Buckland’s personal theories on the Burning Times and interpretation of the Threefold Law as if they were fact.

And thanks to her runaway popularity, those of us who instruct and answer questions from newer witches have to UNTEACH all of this nonsense.

If it were simply a matter of being a product of her time, I could forgive some of the nonsense. But she’s still selling mammy dolls on her website, though she labels them as “primitive” and equates them to “positive voodoo dolls.” Yes, she's been confronted about this, and yes she doubled down. I don’t think I need to explain how gross and racist this is on SEVERAL levels. She's been given opportunities to show growth and self-work with regards to her work and simply refuses to believe that she was ever wrong about anything.

So, her books aren't entirely worthless by any means, but they require a LOT of critical reading and a strong understanding of actual history and science. Furthermore, she leans rather hard into a borderline cult mentality that boils down to, "Nobody understands you, but because you're drawn to witchcraft, you're SPECIAL, probably because of some ancient hereditary superpower, so don't worry - Mama Silver understands you. Also, there's no need to read further into anything, just take my word for it."

I would not recommend them for beginners, which is a problem because that's exactly the demographic her work is marketed toward. (Personally, I would not recommend them for anybody, but that's just my opinion.)

For more details, I suggest the following articles:

Continuing Anger Over Silver Ravenwolf

The Problem With Silver Ravenwolf

Trae Dorn (@traegorn) of BS-Free Witchcraft expands on the topic in this video. They've been wrestling with this issue for YEARS within the Wiccan and wider witchcraft communities and I'm sure they could cite examples I've missed.

[yarrowthewitch]

i love having the hubris to go 'sure i'll try that, how hard can it be' about every creative skill under the sun. jack of all trades master of shit fuck but who says you have to be a master??? maybe i want to sew a mediocre plushie and code a janky mod and write a bland song. im having fun. im in my lane. im learning and im thriving.

[yarrowthewitch]

Too many people will pass around "always trust your gut!" and "your intuition never lies" content when actually your "intuition" isn't immune to either propaganda, bigotry or trauma reactions. Which is important to be aware of actually

[yarrowthewitch]

hecate

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🧹💐 SPRING CLEANING REFLECTION ASKS for your magical practice 💐🧹

You can treat this as an ask game or journal prompts leading up to Beltane – I might do both!

Talk about....

🔥 A favourite ritual 🐉 A deity or spirit you used to work with 🐚 A deity or spirit you currently work with 🌻 A magical encounter in nature ☕ A magical encounter in the city 🌟 A time you improvised with what you had 🌶 A risky offering 🥀 A working that didn't work out 🦉 A mentor or person who's influenced your practice 🌱 A skill you're working on 🍇 An offering you're proud of ⚡ A favourite collaboration 🐾 The furthest you've ever travelled for magical purposes 🏺 An ancestor (blood or chosen) 🐬 A culturally specific belief or practice of yours 🦂 A mistake (that you're willing to talk about) ⛈ An ethic or value that's central to your practice 🌗 One way that your practice has changed 🍁 Something you miss about an older version of your practice 🦀 A bad habit 🌋 A magical gift (either something you're Gifted At, or a gift you've received) 🐝 Your magical/spiritual community 🔮 A memorable divination session 🍄 A dream or vision 🐣 A goal for your practice

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Bioregional Quiz