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@fuckhavingadestiny
Jewish Mysticism and itâs various forms represent an attempt to interpret the religious values of Judaism in terms of mystical values. It concentrates upon the idea of the living God who manifests [Themself] in the acts of Creation, Revelation and Redemption. Pushed to its extreme, the mystical meditation on this idea gives birth to the conception of a sphere, a whole realm of divinity, which underlies the world of our senseâdata and which is present and active in all that exists. This is the meaning of what the Kabbalists call the world of the âSefirothâ.
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; First Lecture: General Characteristics of Jewish Mysticism
Grief Powder
Salt
Rosemary
Lavender
Grind in a pestle and mortar until the herbs release their fragrance.
Although the dead may not heal, the living may. Let the spirit rest, and let those left behind remember them, and rest peacefully as well.
Spill blood or tears into the container, then allow to charge overnight. Grind once more. Toss on a mourners property, a photograph of the deceased, or use is rituals of grief.
The Red Disk, 1960, Joan Miro
Dearest Caretaker, could you tell me where you've found the information that Agrippa developed the Celestial Alphabet as a way to avoid antisemitism? I'd love to know there are classic occultists that aren't terrible, but I'd like to be sure of it before I start stanning. I offer my late grandma's bracelet and my collection of baby teeth.
MOST OF THIS IS FROM THE BRILL DICTIONARY OF GNOSIS AND WESTERN ESOTERICISM BY WOUTER J. HANEGRAAF:
IN 1509 HE WAS HIRED TO TEACH HEBREW AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LYON AS HE WAS ONE OF THE FEW CHRISTIANS IN EUROPE THAT SPOKE THE LANGUAGE THIS WAS THE PEAK OF THE INQUISITION WHEN ANTI-JEWISH SENTIMENTS IN EUROPE WERE AT A FEVER PITCH
IN 1510 HE PUBLISHED De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminae sexus âON THE EXCELLENCE AND NOBILITY OF THE FEMININE SEX,â A LIGHT-HEARTED WORK THAT USES CONCEPTS FROM JEWISH THEOLOGY TO PROVE THAT WOMEN ARE GREAT. THIS WAS HIS WAY OF GINGERLY INTRODUCING HIS STUDENTS TO THE IDEA THAT MAYBE JEWISH PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY NOT DEMONS WHO SHOULD BE EXTERMINATED. THIS WAS AN INCREDIBLY RISKY THING TO PUBLISH AND BY SHOWING PRO-JEWISH SENTIMENTS HE WAS ACTIVELY PUTTING HIS LIFE AND CAREER IN DANGER.
HE WAS GIVEN A DOCTORATE FOR HIS WORK AT LYON, BUT WAS DENOUNCED BY THE LOCAL FRIAR AND WAS FORCED TO FLEE THE COUNTRY
IN HIS RETORT TO THE FRIAR HE WROTE "I am a Christian, but I do not dislike Jewish Rabbis"
WHICH SEEMS PRETTY LUKEWARM BUT WHEN PUT IN CONTEXT WITH THE REST OF HIS WORK AND THE POLITICAL SENTIMENTS OF THE TIME, YOU REALIZE THAT LINE SHOULD BE READ AS DELIGHTFULLY SMUG AND DRIPPING WITH VENOM POINTED AT THE FRIAR. HE IS ESSENTIALLY SAYING âYEAH IM PRO-JEWISH BUT IM NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU AMMUNITION TO THROW ME TO THE INQUISITION NICE TRY FUCKOâ
IF YOU THINK IM READING TOO MUCH INTO THAT, HIS PENCHANT FOR SUBVERSIVE SARCASM NEVER STOPPED. HE ENDS HIS FINAL WORK, THE THIRD BOOK OF OCCULT PHILOSOPHY, POSSIBLY THE MOST INFLUENTIAL OCCULT TEXT IN HUMAN HISTORY, WITH A PASSAGE ALONG THE LINES OF âBut all of this is for sure fake wizards are evil because the church said so praise god uwuâ
Getting Started: The Seven Laws of Magic
Magic is an inherently mysterious thing but there is a strange logic to its nature. Describing said nature is a difficult thing. How does one describe something that can never truly be known?
The answer for most of history? poorly. Practitioners of the arcane arts are not known for straightforward explanations. I will do my best to explain the basic mechanics:
The Law of Contagion: Once together, always together. The part of the thing is the whole of the thing. By performing magic on a strand of your hair, one can effect your entire body. The more intimate the connection, the more powerful the effect. A cigarette butt you smoked will have almost no effect, but a phial of your blood will be extremely effective. Magic using this law is known as Thaumaturgy.
The Law of Sympathy: Like attracts like. The image is the thing. A drawing or representation of something can gain its properties. A photo or drawing of you will have a similar thaumaturgical connection to you. Combining sympathy and contagion is the basis for poppet magic.
The Law of Correspondence: As Above, So Below. The gods are like us and we are like them. When viewed closely, atoms resemble solar systems. The big effects the small. The idea that there is a sort of harmony between similar patterns no matter their size. This is the basis behind astrological magic.
The Law of Resistance: Some things are more magically conductive than other things. Everything exists on a spectrum of âmagicalâ to âmundaneâ and the less magic something is, the harder it is to effect with magic. The same extends to people who, for whatever the reason, simply have a harder time being interacting with magic.Â
The Law of Balance: Magic seeks equilibrium, and therefore, every magical action has a cost. No magical act takes place without some sort of power behind it. Energy will not move unless something is moving it, be it a practitioner or the natural energy of the moon. A body in motion will stay in motion, a body at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.
The Law of Reciprocity: If you donât know where its pointed, its pointed at you. If it doesnât have enough energy, it will get get energy from you. The process of getting hit with your own improperly constructed spell is known as Recoil. Safe practice often involves setting up wards to act as a barrier between you and any mistakes.
The Law of Reversal: That which is done by magic can be undone by magic. For every spell there is a counterspell, for every ritual a counterritual. Every ward can be hexed, every curse can be dispelled. This does not mean countermeasure will be easy or efficient.
The Hercules Globular Cluster - M13 [OC]
There is such a weird irony in someone being against cultural appropriation in witchcraft/magic and then turning around and practicing âQabbalahâ, OTO, Thelema etc which is all just appropriation from Jewish mysticism. Oy vey.
My absolute least favorite is when someone argues that because something was appropriated so long ago that somehow doesnât count and makes it part of their culture?
All Genders Wrap
All Genders Wrap is a series of tutorial videos with a cast of a diverse group of Jews of all genders demonstrating how to wrap tefillin. Â The video above shows right handers wrapping in an Ashkenazi style.Â
This video shows two Sephardi-style variations for right handers:
This video shows left handers wrapping in an Ashkenazi style:
Ancient Hebrew inscription of Jewish Goddess Asherah, 8th century B.C.E.
âArchaeological evidence including inscriptions, figurines and ancient texts as well as details in the Bible, indicate not just that he [god] was one of several worshipped in ancient Israel, but that he was also coupled with a Goddess. She was worshipped alongside him in the Temple in JerusalemâŚ
Far more significant is the Bibleâs admission that Goddess Asherah was worshipped in Yahwehâs Temple in Jerusalem. In the Book Of Kings, weâre told that a statue of Asherah was housed in the Temple and that female Temple personnel wove ritual textiles for Her.
In fact, although the Bible condemns all of these practices, the biblical texts suggest that Goddess worship was a thriving feature of high-status religion in Jerusalem. What, then, was her relationship to Yahweh?
I attempted to track down this divine couple in my new BBC2 documentary series, Bibleâs Buried Secrets. Until the discovery in the early 20th Century of an ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit in what is now modern-day Syria, very little was known about the goddess Asherah.
But ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed here reveal that She was a powerful âfertilityâ Goddess. [Mother Goddess, Creator, etc]
But perhaps most significant of all, Asherah was also the wife of El, the high god at Ugarit  -  a god who shares much in common with Yahweh. Given the evidence within the Bible that She was worshipped in the Temple in Jerusalem, might She have played the role of a divine wife in ancient Israel too?
Strikingly, Yahweh is often called âElâ in the Bible and he performs many of the same roles. Despite numerous references to Asherah worship in the Bible, there wasnât enough evidence to link her explicitly with the high god of ancient Israel, Yahweh. Until, that is, the discovery of a remarkable ceramic inscription in the Sinai desert.Â
The inscription was photographed and recorded by archaeologists and scholars of ancient Israelite religion, so we know what it looked like  -  and importantly  - what it said.
Dating to about the 8th Century BCE, it was found at a remote site called Kuntillet 'Ajrud, and was written on a large piece of a broken pottery.
The inscription is a petition for a blessing. Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherahâ. Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife.
Finding the original inscription, however, has proved impossible. Discovered in the Sinai in the Seventies, the real thing has since been mysteriously 'lostâ. Neither the BBC team of researchers nor my academic colleagues and contacts could locate it.
The antiquities authorities of Israel and Egypt claim to have no knowledge of its whereabouts. Was the inscription simply a casualty of the bureaucratic confusion arising from the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967?
Or did someone take the decision that such a potentially unsettling piece of evidence about the Jewish and Christian god was better hidden?
Godâs relationship with Asherah was brought to an end with the rise of monotheism just a few centuries after our traveller inscribed his request for a blessing on an old piece of pottery.
ConsequentlyâŚthe worldâs biggest monotheistic religionsâŚnow have at their heart a solitary male deity.
I canât help but wonder what the world would be like had the Goddess remained.â
- Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, âWhy the BBCâs new face of religion believes God had a WIFEâ
Always credit artists. This was created by bluecollards on IG.
Read this:
âI want to tell a story about an invisible elephant.
Once upon a time, when I was in graduate school at UCSB, the department of religious studies held a symposium on diasporic religious communities in the United States. Our working definition for religious diaspora that day was, âreligious groups from elsewhere now residing as large, cohesive communities in the US.â It was a round table symposium, so any current scholar at the UC who wanted to speak could have a seat at the table. A hunch based on hundreds of years of solid evidence compelled me to show up, in my Badass Academic Indigenous Warrior Auntie finery.
There were around 15-20 scholars at the table, and the audience was maybe fifty people. There was one Black scholar at the table, and two Latinx scholars, one of whom was one of my dissertation advisors. The other was a visiting scholar from Florida, who spoke about the diasporic SanterĂa community in Miami. But everyone else at the table were white scholars, all progressively liberal in their politics, many of whom were my friends. Since there was no pre-written agenda, I listened until everyone else had presented. I learned a tremendous amount about the Jewish diaspora in the US, and about the Yoruba/Orisha/Voudou, Tibetan Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu communities, and even about a small enclave of Zoroastrians.
As they went on, I realized my hunch had been correct, and I listened to them ignore the elephant, invisible and silent, at that table.
So I decided to help her speak the hell up. âHello, my name is Julie Cordero. Iâm working on my PhD in Ethnobotany, Native American Religious Traditions, and history of global medical traditions. Iâd like to talk about the European Catholic and Protestant Christian religious diaspora in the United States, as these are the traditions that have had by far the greatest impact on both the converted and non-converted indigenous inhabitants of this land.â
Total silence. And then several âhot damnsâ from students and colleagues in the audience. I looked around the table at all the confused white faces. My Latinx advisor slapped his hand on the table and said, âRight!!?? Letâs talk about that, colleagues.â
The Black scholar, who was sitting next to me, started softly laughing. As I went on, detailing the myriad denominations of this European Christian Diaspora, including the Catholic diocese in which Iâd been raised and educated, and the brutal and genocidal Catholic and Protestant boarding schools that had horribly traumatized generations of First Nations children, and especially as I touched on how Christians had twisted the message of Christ to try and force people stolen from Africa to accept that their biblically-ordained role was to serve the White Race, her laughs grew more and more bitter.
The Religious Studies department chair, whoâd given a brilliant talk on the interplay between Jewish and Muslim communities in Michigan, stopped me at one point, and said, âJulie, I see the point you are so eloquently making, but youâre discussing American religions, not religious diasporic communities.â I referred to the definition of diaspora we had discussed at the start of the discussion, and then said, âNo, Clark. If I were here to discuss religions that were not from elsewhere, Iâd be discussing the Choctaw Green Corn ceremony, the Karuk Brush Dance, the Big Head ceremonial complex in Northern California, the Lakota Sun Dance, or the Chumash and Tongva Chingichnich ritual complex.â
It got a bit heated for a few moments, as several scholars-without-a-damn-clue tried to argue that we were here to discuss CURRENT religious traditions, not ancient.
Well. Iâll let you use your imagination as to the response from the POC present, which was vigorously backed by the three young First Nations students who were present in the audience (all of whom practice their CURRENT ceremonial traditions). It got the kind of ugly that only happens with people whose self-perception is that they, as liberal scholars of world cultures with lots of POC friends and colleagues, couldnât possibly be racist.
Our Black colleague stood and left without a word. I very nearly did. But I stayed because of my Auntie role to the Native students in the audience.
I looked around at that circle of hostile faces, and waited for one single white scholar to see how unbelievably racist was this discursive erasure of entire peoples - including my people, on whose homeland UCSB is situated.
Finally, a friend spoke up. âIf we are going to adhere to the definition of diaspora outlined here, she is technically correct.â
And then my dear friend, a white scholar of Buddhism: âIn Buddhist tradition, the Second Form of Ignorance is the superimposition of that which is false over that which is true. In this case, all of us white scholars are assuming that every people but white Americans are âother,â and that we have no culture, when the underlying fact is that our culture is so dominant that weâve deluded ourselves into thinking itâs the neutral state of human culture against which all others are foreign. Even the Black people our ancestors abducted and enslaved we treat as somehow more foreign than ourselves. And, most absurdly, the peoples who are indigenous to this land are told that we belong here more than they do.â
People stared at their hands and doodled. The audience was dead quiet.
And you know what happened then? The elephant was no longer invisible, and my colleagues and I were able to have a conversation based on the truths about colonialism and diaspora. We were THEN able to name and discuss the distinctions between colonial settlements and immigrant settlements, and how colonial religious projects have sought to overtake, control, and own land, people, and resources, while immigrant and especially refugee diasporic communities simply seek a home free from persecution.
As we continue this national discussion, it is absolutely key to never, ever let that elephant be invisible or silent. You are on Native Land. Black descendants of human beings abducted from their African homelands are not immigrants. European cultures are just human cultures, among many. And the assignation of moral, cultural, racial superiority of European world views over all non-Euro human cultures is a profound delusion, one that continues to threaten and exterminate all people who oppose it, and even nature itself.
I hope that this story has comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.â
-Â Julie Cordero-Lamb, herbalist & ethnobotanist from the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation
jews for black lives âđťâ¤ď¸
credit: adamkylometers on instagram
Great advice right here.
Do you think itâs ethical to cast a spell or two on a coworker to encourage her to stop working with me? We work in a daycare and this woman has no patience with the two year olds, she treats me and another teacher like weâre idiots, she talks to the kids like theyâre dogs, and sheâs only here because of nepotism. I donât have anything I can do besides mild passive aggression (because Iâm the newest hire and I donât want to rock the boat too much) but I cannot stand this woman at all
Personally if itâs for the betterment of the children and not a personal vendetta, I think itâs more ethical to do so. Just make sure you add in protections for better help if thatâs part of the plan. Otherwise youâll have more responsibility on your shoulders in the end.
My go-to for this kind of situation is simple:
âDo better, get better, be better. And do it somewhere that i am not.â
Then just structure the specifics around that.
Jews wanting to know if someone is Jewish is very different from goyim wanting to know if someone is Jewish
Thereâs an old Jewish joke about that, because of course there is.
dare i ask what it is
(look, I left that wide open, somebody had to ask what it is)
So itâs sometime in late-19th-century Europe, and a little old Jewish man is taking a journey by train. Â Whereâs he going? I donât know where heâs going, thatâs not part of the story. Â Heâs just sitting there in the train car with his little suitcase, minding his own business, maybe watching the scenery go by, when suddenly â
â suddenly the door between cars opens, and a big burly guy swaggers in and plants himself in the middle of the aisle, and bellows âAre there any Jews in this car?â
Of course thereâs dead silence, and of course our guy is frozen, because all his personal and cultural experience tells him that answering yes automatically to that question is not a survival-oriented behavior.
âAny Jews in this car?â the big man repeats, getting impatient â and he looks like the kind of man who gets angry when heâs impatient.
Except our guy is suddenly angry himself, because itâs not right that this kind of question should make him so afraid.
So he drops his suitcase on the floor, thump, and he gets to his feet and he shouts âYes!  Iâm a Jew!  What do you care?â
And the big man looks at him and beams like the sun coming up, and says âChasdei Hashem! Come with me, reb yid, we need a tenth for a minyan in the next car.â