Traditional Witchcraft and Female Spirituality @cunningwomxn - Tumblr Blog

Tbh there never was a God, just the Goddess. Tbh Adam created patriarchal abrahamic religions to spite the Goddess. Tbh males are physically stronger because they were created to serve as helpers for women. Tbh I'm going to indulge this counter-idea to Abrahamic religion a little bit with a little mythical story from my own mind, so here-goes!

The Goddess made Eve and then Adam as her helper, which is the reason males have higher amounts of muscle, so they could serve as optimal helpers for those created in the image of the Goddess. The Goddess gifted Eve an apple tree for being the first creation of the Goddess. The apples from this tree were enchanted to give Eve, and thus her descendants, the power to create life as the Goddess does (i.e. creating life with her womb) if she chose to do so. She forbade Adam from eating from it, and placed a disenchantment upon the tree so that if Adam did eat from it, he would not receive the powers. However, Adam did eat from it, and when the Goddess confronted him, he told her he did not mean to, and that Eve had forced him to do so. The Goddess knew his words were mistruths, and placed upon him a curse for his lies and attempt to slander Eve's name. Hence-forth, he would live with the reality of his lies in his throat - the Adam's apple - and all males thereafter would bare the mark of the Original Lie. Adam went on to spread the lies he spoke that day. To spite the Goddess' name, he claimed that there was a God, never mentioning the Goddess, spreading lies that men were created in the image of a God, and that women were created as helpers to be oppressed and used, and from there came the Abrahamic religions. From there, Adam created a world where Eve, her descendants, and the Goddess they were made in the image of would be oppressed by the men whose physical strength was meant to serve them.

The Goddess retaliated by placing a curse upon men, that their kind would slowly disappear from existence upon Earth (the generational shrinking of the Y chromosome).

argyrocratie

“But what about when magic was political? It’s here that theory fails us. So allow me to offer a suggestion. What’s missing from most accounts is a serious consideration of two factors which always seem surround magic, in the popular imagination: scepticism, and fear. I doubt many Thessalian peasants believed that witches could really pluck out the moon; but probably most suspected anyone who made such claims might be capable of something fairly terrible. They might have been sceptical about the witches, but they were equally sceptical about philosophers who would assure them such people had no powers whatsoever. Why take chances?

It’s this factor of intimidation which I suspect explains the relation with state politics. In ancient Rome, when the state clamped down, magic effectively disappeared. I witnessed almost the exact opposite phenomena in rural Madagascar. Madagascar had, for most of this century, been under the grip of a typical colonial police state. Over the course of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the state abandoned the countryside entirely. The police disappeared completely. By 1990, just about everyone had become a magician of some sort or another—or more accurately, perhaps, was willing to insinuate they might be. The result was a society where it was considered elementary common sense that one should be very polite to strangers because you never know who might know how to blast you with lightning, wither your crops or render your children insane. This general uncertainty produced a remarkable degree of social peace.

There were professional magicianss, too: astrologers, mediums, curers. Everyone assumed that most were frauds; that most of their amazing effects (eating glass, sucking out objects from under peoples’ skins..) were mere stage illusions; most of those who claimed to be able to cast lightning, simply liars. (Even so, one would hardly be wise to go about provoking such a person.) This is what anthropologists have discovered just about everywhere. Traditionally, anthropologists have not found all this scepticism particularly interesting: the point, they always say, is that few deny that the genuine item does, somewhere, exist. I think it’s very interesting. After all, consider what one is saying when one says a magician is a fraud. One is saying that there are some people who clearly are powerful and influential, but whose power is really based on nothing other than their ability to convince others that they have it. Is this not a profound insight into the nature of social power? In fact, I suspect this is the real reason social theorists feel uncomfortable acknowledging this political aspect of magic—or perhaps, in talking about magic at all. Magic captures something of the essence of political power: the fact that there is always something paradoxical, circular, and just a little bit stupid about the whole thing.

The power of magicians, I am suggesting, is simply a slightly more outrageous, smalltime carnival version of the kind held by kings and consuls: a power which strives to both seduce and terrify, wielded by figures who try to entertain their audience with preposterous lies at the same time as constantly, tacitly trying to insinuate that, if challenged,. they could also annhilate them—and probably wouldn’t scruple much to do so. A power which many suspect (rightly) comes down to little more than an ability to convince others it exists, but just possibly, might be something more than that. No wonder real politicians the world over tend to have the same reaction to such people: either, like the Persian emperors, they adopt them as assistants, or if not, the urge is always to do as so many Roman ones: to have them expelled from the city, clapped in irons, or put to death. The only emperor who dabbled in magic himself, as far as we know, was Nero (a great lover of theatrical effects). He was sufficiently curious to have himself initiated by a genuine Persian magus. After a while, though, he grew bored of it: apparently, because he realized there was no power magic could give him that he didn’t already have”

- David Graeber, “The Politics of Magic”

unruly-rose

Goddess Group Chat

The name says it really. Are you a woman who worships the goddess and sees it as part of her life's work to help other women and girls? Would you like a small group of like-minded women to help keep you focused and give you somewhere to talk openly about your experiences and beliefs?

kitchenalia

my primary point of deadly hubris is that i just don’t think a bear would attack me. i think she would sense that i am a friend to her species and would leave me be

female-eren

I'm 100% convinced midwife was the first "profession". Like before humans or ape-hominids or whatever they're called even started making tools they were helping each other give birth

333444555

If someone has sources on that, please post!

vgvulva

@333444555 happy to oblige!

Around 20% of modern female pelvises have a pelvic inlet that is dangerous for childbirth, and that there is normal biological variation in the internal anatomy of females including the cervix, uterus, and the position of the fetus, that can impact ease of childbirth [the pelvic inlet, how wide the pelvis is from front to back, is shown in the middle diagram]

Essentially, we cannot predict the exact position of internal organs, or the shape of the pelvis, making childbirth difficult in today’s population.

Our modern pelvis shape evolved in Homo sapiens in Africa and the Near East around 200,000 years ago, and our heads have gotten smaller in the last 35,000 years, so it has actually gotten easier for women to give birth over the past 35,000 years, in comparison to 35-200,000 years ago.

Some of our closest ancestors, Homo neanderthalensis, had a different birthing mechanism to modern humans, but research suggests that childbirth was similarly painful and dangerous nonetheless.

Unfortunately there is little evidence for midwifery in Prehistory, although we can certainly extrapolate from other archaeological evidence for care! There is evidence of a Neanderthal man who survived to his forties despite serious debilitating injury (Shanidar Man), as well as evidence for this child in the Middle Palaeolithic who would have had moderate to severe brain trauma, and potential paralysis following a head injury at the age of 6, but was cared for and buried with flowers at around 13.

There is no doubt in my mind that women in particular have been caring for their friends and daughters in childbirth, and leading care in their communities since the dawn of time

deathandmysticism

Illustration from New Elucidations of Thomson’s Seasons, 19th century

xxriverdaughterxx

it's so cute how ppl think the personification of Mother Earth would be beautiful and young and flowery and not like... horrifying and reeking of fire and death and decay

user87262893

When I think about the reality of it too much, I get nauseous.

Fourteen and raped.

Caught in a time, caught in a world where it was impossible to tell anyone.

Caught between the sharp edge of a stone and the long walk of an aisle.

Save your honor.

Save your fathers pride.

Die by the communities hand, stone flung by fingers just grateful to be on the other side -

Or the slow death. Your honor restored by submission to the one who violated you.

His bride.

Prodded again by his tool until you are weeping, undone in ways as drastic as the stone, but invisible nonetheless.

I wonder if she wept when her blood didn't come.

When silence wasn't enough to hide what had happened.

Was the idea itself a God-gift? Sprung from divine intervention?

No; it was the imagination of a little girl who found a labyrinths path to deliverance.

Did she struggle with the blaspheme of it?

Did she even still believe, after what she had endured?

She was not the first little girl abandoned by God.

But she would be the first to call him back.

Claim Divine power.

Feverent cry, half rage half prayer:

'If you deem make me a mother, then I will be the Mother of God.'

And so the story came to her.

"An angel came unto me," she claimed, warping the truth of the demon man who came into her, "he said the child born from my virgin womb will be called holy, Son of God!"

Did her betrothed quake in her God power? Or did he suspect? Joseph obeyed God, whether or not he knew her to be his own wife.

Refugee. Liar. Saint.

They fled and the child was born.

No room in the inn, but room in her heart.

"Bastard boy," did she whisper lovingly, conspiratorily, amongst the frankincense and myrrh, "my gift to you will be the Kingdom of Heaven."

A quiet child. Did she want a quiet life? Yet her survival was dependent on the tale.

How old was he when she let him inherit the story?

Did she wonder who he would have been if she had not molded him to her lie?

Hunted messiah. Pauper prophet.

The disciples came.

The miracles followed.

And none knew the first of the miracles; a story from a little girls lips, a Savior unto her own self.

Did Mary swap the water for the wine? Did Mary procur the loaves of bread, the fish?

Did she watch with awe or anger as he claimed each feat for his own self?

Is this not always the mothers way; to offer their broken backs to their sons.

When it went downhill, I can picture how she trembled. She could see the end of the labyrinth, I'm sure. She knew a truth that could undo the inevitable end.

Mary kept her silence.

Even if she had spoke, what is a woman's word against the Son of God.

So her story marched on, and she watched her son get caught up in a Holy War of her own creation.

Upon his execution, he cried out "Father, why hath thou forsaken me?"

Did she want to tell him the truth?

Tell him of the evils his true father performed long ago that led to his birth?

Or did she hear his plea to God, "Father, why hath thou forsaken me?", and weep alongside him, a woman forsaken by God long ago, and wonder "me too, me too."

Or did she think to herself, "Son, it was your Mother who hath forsaken you. Forgive me. It was the only way."

animus-inviolabilis

Goddess or Priestess

Found in the “Pillar Shrine” within the Minoan palace of Cnossus, Crete.

16th Century BC

frith-inle

Stripped by Nukeshi

tejuina

“I would no longer say, ‘women have a right to bodily autonomy.’ I would say, ‘women have the exclusive right to preside over human life in formation.’ And thus we will ( r )establish female authority over life.”