[sonofbel-deactivated20240118]

im a serious magician, so of course im back to experimenting with pentacles by trying one to find coins on the street

[sonofbel-deactivated20240118]

I’ll have to wait until wednesday to do it proper but as a first draft I’m using:

* Mercury, specially the god form as Thief at the Gates (may mix it with a bit or jovian wealth cash money magic)

*Psalm 65:13 : “The meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with grain” with a symbol for “shout for joy and sing”

*The very real, obviously ancient, angels Numismiel, Denariel, and Moniel

*Some mangled Agrippan numbers and shapes

*Alpha and Omega in lieu of any Names

[sonofbel-deactivated20240118]

Possible modes of use: wrap around a coin and carry in wallet, write it ON a coin a reduced version, put it inside shoe and stomp calling down some saints, do it proper on metal and shit and carry around in wallet

[sonofbel-deactivated20240118]

very good and very precise first sketch

[sonofbel-deactivated20240118]

yeah idk what to do with the double name, I need another one. Time to mangle some latin (or I’ll just use something from Agripa)

[satsuti]

illustrations from Folk Witchcraft: A Guide to Lore, Land, and the Familiar Spirit for the Solitary Practitioner

[scissorandsieve-deactivated2020]

Any favorite references or stories of New England folklore? I'm looking to build my repertoire of local sources. Thanks for answering if you have the time

I’ve found the New England Folklore blog to be an invaluable resource, as well as the book “The Devil’s Dominion” by Richard Goodbeer. I’m also always looking for new and better resources as well.  http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/search?q=blog

[appleandelder]

Thanks ! You’re great, if I ever come across something good I will shoot it your way.

[serpentandstang-deactivated2021]

A spell to enter the Dream of the Sabbat

“There is a manner of spell-craft which I shall relate and by it seek to invite the reader, irrespective of his or her standing, to step outside and thus within the mysteries of which they are reading.

For this deed of Arte a leather thread and a hagstone are required; the  latter being a stone thorough which there is a hole naturally worn through: a gateway graven by the hands of earth and charmed to open by the tongues of the river. Taking the hagstone in one’s grasp, one should contemplate its opening and entreat it to be a doorway for your going-forth in dreams. One should then take leathern thread and, holding it in one’s hands, should phantasise about the ways of the magical night-procession. Consider the spirits. Think of She who flies forth out of the body and into the freedom of the darksome midnight. Ascend with the spirits through the openings of the flesh; take leave of your mortal abode and roam abroad with the unseen companie of the aire. Step upon the wind and lay yourself into the arms of the sky. Hear the sonorous beating of bird-wing and spirit-wing; hear the rhythm of their flight echoing words of enchantment, patterning the nocturnal plains with sigils of forgotten desires. Behold the gateways to the Other: silhouettes glimpsed against the vault of the stars. Be at one with them; be at one with the night-wandering host of the sky. Let the coolth of the star-river enliven your soul and lead you to the scent-trail of the  pathless path.  Hear the wing-beats of the spirit and feel your heart-beats; hear the heart’s drum and count your steps into the boundless dance of god, man and beast. Behold the companions of the round dance. Behold!

With each poignant atmosphere of phantasie, knot the thread and thus create a rosary of dreaming potentials. When the thread has seven knots, pass it through the mouth of the hagstone and tie to form a loop through which one’s hand may be placed. The stone and thread should be entreated with a final prayer for the spell to work. Then, at the end of one’s waking day, the stone should be held in one’s hand (generally the one most seldom used) and the cord wrapped around the wrist. The stone should rest within the hand like a child in its crib. Then I bid you forget about it ‘til morning. Perchance in dreaming your spirit shall pass through the stone-mouth and wander abroad in the night-walkers’ procession, flying freely to the place that some have called ‘Sabbat’. Where-ever the dreaming takes you, the thread of knots shall guide and bring you home, once more to waken at the edge of day.

If no dreams befall you by night, then recall the deeds of the spell – for there in phantasie are the fore-echoes of that which is not yet remembered.

Such is a spell to enter the Dream of the Sabbat.”

— Andrew Chumbley, from “What is Traditional Craft? – A Brief Discourse regarding the nature of Traditional Witchcraft and allied forms of Magical Practice”

[littlewitchlingrowan]

Mom is under the weather so the witchcraft is real in this house tonight. Illness be gone, I don’t have time for your shit.

[manicbucket]

mind if I ask for the recipe? :)

[littlewitchlingrowan]

No, not at all! 😊 This is a family recipe that I swear by. It never, ever fails me.

Alright, this is a chicken soup recipe, so there will be meat products being used. I figure I oughta give that disclaimer since I don’t know who may be vegetarian/vegan.

Now onto your ingredients: -Two boxes of store bought chicken broth -One white onion -Garlic (I use the pre-minced store garlic because a) it saves time and b) it’s much easier to infuse into the broth) -Celery -Carrots -Wide egg noodles -Chicken bouillon cubes -Salt -Pepper -Bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs.

Directions:

Get yourself a big ass soup pot, toss in your chicken, chicken broth and fill the rest of the way with water (you want your pot about ¾ full). Put it on high and vent your lid. Par boil your chicken until it begins trying to boil over then reduce heat to med-high and let simmer. This is where you get your rich, hearty stock from. The broth, fat from the skin and marrow from the bones do wonderful things together, let me tell you.

While this happens, dice your carrots and celery ahead of time and set them aside. Once your chicken is done (it’ll look kinda gray and yellow instead of white and pink), pluck it out of the pot into a large bowl. Move your pot off the heat so it doesn’t cook out your stock. One by one, move a thigh into a seperate bowl and proceed to shred your chicken. (Pro-tip, if you have a hand mixer or food processor, this process can go much faster as long as the bones are removed)

Next, put in your veggies and noodles with the shredded chicken. Next comes spices. Add pepper and salt to taste (you can always do a little at a time if you’re worried about going overboard) along with about 4-5 bouillon cubes. If you have minced garlic, add about 4 spoonfuls (the little spoons) into the broth. If you have whole cloves, smash em and mince the shit out of them, about 6 big ones, and toss them in.

Stir really well (I always stir both clockwise and counter to banish sickness and draw wellness). Set the pot back on the heat (remember, med-high) and let that sucker cook until the noodles are just at al-dente. You don’t want em too squishy and mushy. Take this time while the noodles cook to taste your broth repeatedly. You want to taste the all the components strongly without them being too overpowering. Basically, if it burns your throat pleasantly and makes your nose tickle, you got yourself a badass broth.

Once done, serve with fresh cracked pepper and a big ass glass of water or vitamin c rich juice. Remember to remove the pot from the heat even after it’s off so it doesn’t continue to cook out your broth and over-tenderize your noodles.

To store: let the soup cool completely and transfer to a big tupperware and refrigerate. Eat the rest within the next 2 days.

Stay well or get better this season!

[fenland-witch-deactivated202005]

Well this is going in my receipe book!

[littlewitchlingrowan]

Holy crow is this getting notes! While I’m here, I’d like to mention that this soup is going to make you pretty tired. I made this for my sister two months ago and right after she finished, she laid down and slept for 10 hours straight and woke up with a face full of snot but clear sinuses. Tonight, mom ate her bowl and took a 4 hour nap on the couch. She just wandered off to bed after telling me her sinuses and chest already feel much clearer and her throat barely hurts. I’m not sure what it is about this soup, but it knocks you clean out and goes straight to work on what ails you. So be cautious about driving or anything of the sort after eating this. Not that it has the same sedative capabilities as say, morphine, but I would recommend finding a cozy place to curl up afterwards on the off chance you do end up feeling drowsy, just to err on the side of caution. I’d also like to mention that I am in no way a doctor so don’t take my advice in lieu of medical assistance! Please, if you can, seek a doctor first as always. This is purely meant to be used in a supplementary fashion in addition to medication. Okay I’ll leave you guys alone now, I’ve talked your ears off enough.

[littlewitchlingrowan]

Damn, this is STILL getting notes? The flattery is real y'all. Thank you 💕 I hope my recipe is able to bring you comfort and healing when you don’t feel well!

[gallusrostromegalus]

I believe this is the magic soup recipe that one ask was looking for? This looks baller, so I’ll keep the recipe for the next cold snap.

[deerhoofandrabbitsfoot-deactiva]

Witchy Christmas/Yule Idea ⛄️

Go to the cemetery.

Build snowmen.

Invite the souls of the dead into said snowmen.

Snow golems.

Command your army of the dead.

[littlewickedthings]

by Courtney Brooke Hall on Flickr.

[beardedeldridge-deactivated2025]

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there's this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof's friend (a doctor), it's all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It's easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they're important.

[shredsandpatches]

The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It's likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.

[ladytemeraire]

I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?

I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P 

I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers. 

[spiderine]

Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Look, I dont know a lot about saints and Catholicism, but I know St. Agatha is always depicted with her breasts on a plate, and that’s sure something

[fandomsandfeminism]

Just a few more. This is a big trend. 

[royalturkeyz]

Things I learned from the comments

She’s a patron saint of rape and abuse victims

She took a vow a chastity

A low born guy demanded her to be with him and she turned him down

For this she was imprisoned and tortured. This is how she lost her breasts (details not required)

She was repeatedly raped.

The Catholic Church regards her as a virgin for her peity despite the rape. (No matter your views on virginity this is a pretty interesting statement)

She was sentenced to death to burn at the stake but was saved by an earthquake

In her holiday people make titty cupcakes

I didn’t know she existed and now I think she’s a pretty rad woman. I would hesitate calling her a protofeminist as some often do with amazing women in history but she is pretty cool. Also she’s still very relevant today as women are still treated the way she was.

[cephalophor]

Saint Agatha! Today, february 5 it is her holy day and in a lot of places in europe it is the day most nightclubs will only allow women to enter since it is kind of a women only patron

[for-ev-ermore-deactivated202107]

Literal female presenting nipples

[imaginarywitchcraft-deactivated]

It's ironic that the stereotypical imagery of a witch is an old, haggardly woman covered in warts because of there's one thing I've come across repeatedly when studying folk magic, it's how to get rid of warts.

[systlin]

black walnuts and black walnut hulls have been aqquired, and black walnuts cleaned and dried and are in a bag in the pantry to eat later.

Black walnut hulls and the bottle of iron and water are ready. Come my next days off, we dying silk black. (And maybe trying some walnut dye on some wool I’ve got, because I like walnut brown and think it would make lovely socks.)

[systlin]

Also need to pick up more walnuts, because black walnuts are good and I like them.

[systlin]

Y’know I have dyed stuff with black walnuts before. Never wool, but we did do tye-dye from natural stuff when I was a kid and black walnut was one of them. Also makes a great wood stain; mom used it to stain a few pieces of furniture she refinished.

I’ve used it on leather before too, to give it a nice deep brown color. Made ink from it before too, for that matter.

[systlin]

It occurs to me that a lot of people may not have a fall tradition of putting on old shoes and gardening gloves and gathering black walnuts in the woods with your mom and granma, so here’s a step by step.

1. Find a black walnut tree. There will be lots of walnuts in the hull underneath it. They look like this.

2. Stomp on ‘em. Stomp ‘em real good. Smush those hulls open. The nut will be in the middle. Pick the nuts out and chuck ‘em in a bag. Save some of the hulls if you want to dye stuff with them.

3. Take your harvest home. Pull out a wheelbarrow, and dump the nuts in. Fill it up with water out of the hose. Any nuts that float, pick out and chuck, they’ll be no good.

4. Take a garden rake and agitate the nuts (heh). Knock ‘em about real good. Dump the water and fill it up with new a couple times, until you’ve got most of the remaining husk off. You don’t HAVE to do this but the nuts’ll taste better if you do.

5. Let ‘em dry

6. Bag ‘em up.

7. On a warm day, go out and whack a bunch open with a hammer on the sidewalk, and then chuck ‘em back in the bag. Pick the nutmeats out with a nut pick inside while watching TV with a hot cup of coffee or cocoa or tea on a cold day.

[ultramarineblues]

Don’t… don’t you guys have nutcrackers ?

Though, the hammer method is pretty funny I’ll admit, but I’d rather do the whole opening and eating operation inside.

A knife also works fine if you know what you’re doing (and are careful, please don’t stab your hand that’s very bad).

[systlin]

I’ve never met the nutcracker that can even dent a black walnut shell. A knife won’t dent ‘em. An english walnut, sure, but not a black walnut. 

[systlin]

Skadi: Too many songs about love.

Skadi: Not enough songs about sword fights

[systlin]

Tell us about santa and why he has 8 reindeer!

OKAY BUCKLE UP CHILDREN

Santa? Is Odin. With a bit of the Turkish Saint Nicholas plastered over top to make him more acceptable to Christianity. 

Let’s wind this back a bit. 

So. In Norse tradition, Odin rose with the wild hunt on Midwinter. Children would leave out offerings of hay or root vegetables in their shoes for Slepnir, Odin’s horse. In norse tradition, all gifts create an obligation that must be returned in kind, so if Odin found the offerings pleasing he would leave treats and sweets in return. 

So. We have a magical bearded man riding through the sky on a winter feast day and leaving treats for children in footwear if they pleased him. Sound familiar? Yeah.

As for Slepnir, Odin’s mount? He has eight legs. So. Bearded man with powerful magic flying through the air on an eight-legged steed on a winter feast day and leaving treats for children in their footwear if they pleased him. 

Yeah. 

Enter Christianity. Now, the midwinter season is important to all cultures that live in cold climates. The passing of the worst of the hard times and the beginning of the longer days and the promise of the return of life and light and fertility is a powerful thing. There were Christian festival days around the same time as Midwinter was celebrated in many polytheistic faiths. Christians found that they couldn’t get people to stop celebrating the feast days they’d been celebrating for several thousand years, so opted instead to just absorb those traditions into their OWN midwinter festivals. It was a far easier and more effective way of convincing people to convert.

So. The tradition of Odin leaving gifts hung on, in a far different form. This was helped by the legend of Saint Nicholas, a Turkish man who inherited a large amount of wealth and who was known and beloved for his habit of slipping money to poor people via leaving it in their stockings as they were hung out to dry after wash day, or by dropping it down their chimneys. This was similar enough to the old Odin myth of leaving gifts in footwear to paste right over top of the older stories with relative ease. So, the man delivering gifts became not Odin, but St. Nick, who delivered gifts via stocking and chimney. 

However, the idea of him flying through the sky, being associated with elves, possessing powerful magic, and the eight-legged steed stuck. (reindeer, incidentally, are an animal with a lot of symbol and power in Norse tales. Ullr, the god of the hunt, had ties to reindeer, and at some point the eight legged horse became eight reindeer.)

Incidentally the image of Santa as a chubby little jolly man didn’t come around until modern advertising began depicting him that way. Before that? A tall, strong man, usually with a staff (echoing Odin’s staff or spear). 

So. There you have it. Santa, the jolly bearded old man of beloved childhood Christmas memories? If you ever wondered where he came from in a ‘Christian’ holiday, there’s your answer. He didn’t. He’s the amalgamation of an ancient Norse god and a Middle Eastern saint, filtered through the lens of pop culture. 

Jim Butcher actually did this very well in the Dresden Files, where Odin makes several appearances, one wearing the mantle of Father Christmas. 

Christianity never really managed to make the old gods vanish. 

[cryptid--dad-deactivated2021042]

@ariesfire0704

[ariesfire0704]

I was on a Foraging course and one of the other members had spent time with the Sami peoples and said they had a story that when they got snowed in in their Lavvu’s the only way to get in and out was through the Smoke hole or “chimney” and that when people were snowed in and couldn’t get food or supplies you could just drop them into the chimney. So the “reindeer” people of the North had story’s of friendly people dropping gifts down chimneys…

[systlin]

Oh this is Very Good, thank you so much for adding this.

[she-initiates-deactivated202006]

“To the Christians, Dionysus was the Devil. The ancients were terrified of Dionysus, because he was a god that just showed up. Entered out of nowhere. He didn’t have a temple on the mountain. He would just show up; and the women, the maenads, would go mad with Dionysian energy. They would run from their well-respected positions as wives, mothers, courtesans, and follow him. And there was this mad ripping-apart; an overwhelming ecstasy and terror. They would go wild; utterly transfigured.”

– Llorraine Neithardt 

[systlin]

I think Loki would be more prone to steal a baby, if he wanted one and the baby in question would be better of

He would, tbh, but he also really, really enjoys making them. He’s not picky about whether he’s the mom or the dad, either.

[dyriratt]

Loki: Ah, the rush of stealing babies cannot be beat, especially when the parents are shit and you’re freeing an infant from a life of pain. But gods do I live for making them. Give or get, pregnancy is a wild ride. Supporting someone you love through building a small version of the two of you combined? Rad af. Building a tiny version of yourself and someone else inside yourself? Totally sick. Making people is dope af, especially when you consider the suprise factor. What will it be this time? Another serpent? Giant wolf? Twins? Skskskskssk cannot wait to see!

[sandstoneandoldbone]

The moon shows her shadowed face,

The spinning begins, whispering as it goes

It speaks of twisted fates,

Listen close and you will hear

The wresting threads soft song.

[sandstoneandoldbone]

Progeny and prosperity of family

Mystery of Michael

Protection of the Trinity