Game Changer & Make Some Noise
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hello vonnie
tumblr dot com
shark vs the universe
NASA
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cherry valley forever
occasionally subtle
@theartofmadeline
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Jimmy Eat World
d e v o n
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Doug Jones
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RMH
bliss lane
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@coyote-fawn
Online Witchcraft Community in 2026: I feel like everyone is just repeating each other's content and nothing is original anymore.
Online Witchcraft Community in 2002: *three dozen unconnected static websites with verbatim copies of the exact same material, but with falling stars in the background and daggers as the mouse pointer*
"magic isnt real" ok lol so explain how that djinn from chicago and some unnamed second party were able to close the sandstorm portal in time
theemeraldforestafterdark
the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists
we're going to try again witha little but minimal casting
IT will happen in August of 2026. like to charge and reblog to cast but cast sparingly
Wait stop. everyone +like now and spread it a little but cast on the same day in August. lets try August 6th or something.
CAST NOW
Pagan writers when talking about female deities: "They're a mother goddess"
Pagan writers when talking about male deities: "Well, their role and function is a lot more complicated and important than just just being a father god, and here's a 10k word essay discussing why they're more than just a father god"
Children do not go to Valhalla
I saw one of those "Valhalla does not discriminate against the type of battle you lost" posts go by my dash. I really want to say something but the notes are full of people grieving and saying how much comfort this re-interpretation gave them and I'm not that much of a bastard.
This story of the littlest cancer patient going to Valhalla is kind of upsetting but I struggle to articulate why. It's like Christianity wearing my faith like a costume.
I don't want to call it cultural appropriation because, you know, Norse Paganism/Heathenry/Ásatru is a reconstruction of a dead faith - a (more or less) historically-informed best guess based on scanty surviving evidence (much, if not all, of that Christianised). It's public domain mythology, reuse and remix as you like, etc, etc.
But...
Valhalla is not and has never been a place of rest and healing, and to say it is is to fundamentally misunderstand the mythology. Valhalla is where Odinn is building an army to fight the war at the end of the world. It is not a place for children or victims of domestic violence or cancer patients or anyone like that.
If you're drawn to Norse mythology, if you're grieving and you want to believe that your loved ones are in a better place, let me give you a different story.
It starts with a little girl, a child whom the gods deemed monstrous. Her name is Hela and she's the daughter of Loki, so she every right to claim a home in Ásgard. But, as I said, she was called monstrous for her appearance and her heritage and all but cast out. She was given her own realm, far away from the gods, and tasked with caring for the dead that Odinn (etc) have no use for.
The charge that the gods give this outcast child was considered shit-work. Un-honourable, if not actually dishonourable. An insult for a goddess.
But Hela took that duty with solemnity and made Helheim a home for her wards. It's not a hall full of warriors feasting and drinking and fighting. It's quiet; a rest at the end of a hard life. A place full of children and grandparents, mothers and fathers, farmers and shepherds. You and me.
Helheim, like its mistress, is misunderstood and maligned. When we, who have no place in war, die, Hela will accept us into her hall, care for us, and let us to rest, instead of demanding we keep fighting forever.
It's where most of us will go, and that is not a bad thing. There are no entry requirements. It's not heaven, it's not even The Good Place, it's the default - to be with our people, to be cared for and looked after, to be free from pain and struggle. Helheim is a place of acceptance, care, peace, and rest. It's not paradise, but I don't think it sounds that bad.
"not going back"
image description: a ceramic werewolf crouching low on all fours, snarling furiously upwards. Its fur is black and warm brown.
sold
I love her, your honour
Decolonizing means we're going to have to learn to leave some words behind.
Decolonization isn't a metaphor. It isn't some untouchable ideal. It's an active, constant process of undoing and unlearning, while re-learning and re-making ourselves.
The world has moved on, indigenous peoples are exhausted of saying this, but some people are still stuck in 1900's racist terminology. Eliade, author that, in my opinion, we have to thank for popularizing the term "shamanism", claimed that the rituals of shamans are first and foremost ancient techniques in "primitive" cultures.... which ties back to the racist idea that some peoples and traditions are less developed, "savages, primitives", less evolved than the white people who engaged in "advanced, civilized" european religions.
"The Tungus (also known as Evenki) word saman or xaman, from which the term “shaman” is derived, is among the most frequently used indigenous terms in the history of religions and anthropology. Other examples, historical or contemporary, are fetish from the Portuguese Congo, mana from Melanesia, tabu (taboo) from Polynesia, totem (dotem) from the Ojibwa in North America, and potlatch from the North West coast of North America. These and other concepts were uncritically employed as comparative notions in anthropology until they fell into disrepute with the abandonment of reductionist evolutionary theory during the 1920s. Since that time, scholars have called attention to the semantic problems of taking words out of their original linguistic, religious, and cultural contexts in order to give them a universal meaning."
"In the history of religions and anthropology the term “shaman” has become a common denominator for religious specialists in indigenous traditions outside the Western cultural sphere, particularly in so-called “primitive” cultures. The predominant view among specialists on shamanism has been that the shaman can only exist in simple communities, i.e., in nomadic cultures based on hunting, fishing, and gathering. As we shall see, anthropologists have developed a predilection for the dichotomy “shaman” versus “priest” when describing religious specialists operating in non-Western cultures. In this model, “shaman” designates a “primitive” religious specialist living in allegedly “simple” tribal communities whereas the “priest” is a religious specialist in hierarchically organized (e.g., self-styled “civilized”) urban societies."
— both quotes are from Pharo, Lars. (2011). A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts “Shaman” and “Shamanism”. Numen. 58. 6-70. DOI: 10.1163/156852711X540087.
Because I don't have the time nor energy to write a detailed post myself, I'm going to invite the community to these light readings below, and to look into their further reading, as to educate themselves on why certain terms belong in the past and should stay there.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people use the word shaman out of context. I see it as a huge problem within the pagan, witchcraft, and
Following the post “6 Reasons to Stop Using the Word Shaman,” I decided to clarify some of the more controversial points of contention and a
If you want an alternative culturally neutral term, these days we're using the terms "ritualist", "ceremonialist", "ritual specialist" or similar. I also would like to invite people to learn their own culturally-specific terminology, really put some intentionality behind researching your own culture and language and learn the right words for what you're doing, without appropriating and misusing terms from indigenous cultures.
most folks who are sitting there thinking, "What should I put in my grimoire??" probably don't need a grimoire, they need a notebook. a binder. a journal.
this is my official and professional observation as a witch.
I would say yes, others might disagree, but I can't speak for them :')))
My post is less a commentary on what a grimoire is and more a commentary on doing the work of having a practice to document. You know what to put in your grimoire as you develop your path and as you see which things you go back to reference, as you create things you want to remember, as you make changes you think are worth noting.
Worrying about "what do I put in my grimoire??" before you have those things is silly. So don't worry about that. Just put things into notebooks or obsidian vaults or whatever works for you. Whatever things you want.
"Should I document my every ritual in my grimoire?" Put it in a notebook and see if it's useful to you.
"Should I include information on the astrological signs in my grimoire?" Put them in a notebook and see if they're useful to you. Do you go back and reference them ever or are they just pages in a book?
You'll put things in you eventually won't use anymore or like anymore or even completely disagree with. You'll add things that you'll reference a lot to your notebook. Over time you'll wish you had specific information in there and then you'll add it too.
Can the notebook become a grimoire? Sure. Don't worry about that. That's not the point. And should a time come that you want to take things out of your notebook(s) and put them into a fancy book or a new plain notebook, you'll go through your own material and know for yourself what goes in, it won't be me or anyone else out here telling you what you need.
This this this!
It's also easy to fall into the trap of getting a special fancy book that you plan on using for your grimoire, but then it is so special and fancy that you become afraid of writing in it.
If this sounds like you, all the more reason to start with a cheap notebook. This will be your lab notebook as you experiment and get your hands dirty. Cross shit out, tear pages out, spill tea on it. It's fine. This is a rough draft.
Incidentally, as a writer I also cannot emphasize enough the importance of the rough draft. You are SLAPPING IDEAS ONTO THE PAGE BEFORE THEY ESCAPE, they don't need to be fully formed or good. That's for editing, which is a separate process. Don't let yourself get so hung up on potentially making mistakes that you fail to do anything at all.
This was genuinely what it was like growing up in New Agey circles btw, my mum's friends would come round like "So I went out to the woods this weekend and fasted and meditated and I had a vision of the Sacred Stag and all my guardian angels and I asked them how to find love and they said that I need to focus on my own healing first and stop repeating cycles of the past" and then the very next week it'd be like "So I'm back with James again" girl..... the Sacred Stag could not have been more clear....
stop using chatgpt!!!! take a bronze pin and carve your questions onto an ox scapula, then toss it into the fire!!!! use the cracks to divine the gods answer!!!!
citations still have to be APA 7th edition though. if you plagiarise, the gods will flood the yellow river again. and you'll lose your academic standing.
(The Gods, personal communication, July 18, 2024)
remember to bury the dead with a phone, everyone. these days the ferry terminal at the river styx wants you to download a fucking app
by Brad James
gave a time-traveled chalcolithic guy access to a computer and he immediately booted up photoshop and started adding more arrows to a picture of Ötzi and laughing
It actually kind of pisses me off how mainstream consumerist predominantly-white culture ate the vague concept of ~witchy~ spirituality the more I think about it but we don't have to do this right now
Like the most crazymaking thing is I'm a ~spiritual~ person myself but watching people who would have called me delusional and/or possessed by the devil when we were kids get into all the crystals and the tarot cards and whatever feels ........ odd. Lol. Lmao. Not even in a hipstery "I did it before it was cool" way this is about racism. It's racism. It's appropriation and commodification in the most classical sense. It's weird that it's only acceptable for me to practice these things now that it's cool to white people. Can anyone fucking hear me
Joe Van Wormer, The World of the Black Bear, 1966
