Some of my earliest memories are of Sunday mornings.
My hair is curled and I wear a dress of pastel blue or pink or purple. My shiny black shoes are already scuffed. I pick holes in my tights when my mother isn’t looking because I despise them. My mother dresses and styles me before herself. I am five and she is perfect.
The smell of hairspray and the same perfume my grandmother has worn every Sunday for as long as anyone can remember hangs thick in the atmosphere of the car. Sometimes I sleep as the blazing morning light warms my face through the windows. Sometimes I just stare as the soft, rolling backs of the distant Wichita mountains roll by on the horizon.
Eventually, our church comes into view, clear on the other side of town from where we enter. We are rural lakeside dwellers; we pilgrimage each week over twenty miles each way to attend. The building is all red brick, with a whitewashed steeple and cross jutting uncontested into the cloudless Oklahoma sky. The parking lot is colorless and baking in the sun. Concrete, because it is too hot in the southern midwest to use asphalt.
I do not want to go in.
I do not want to walk the lengthy, hot sidewalks up towards the many sets of doors. I do not want to dodge handbags and careless feet and reaching, pinching hands that all want to squeeze parts of my face. I do not want to have to sit there, ears plugged against the blaring music in the vestibule, nor do I want to be separated from my mother and grandmother and join the other children upstairs in Sunday school.
I do not want to be here at all.
These are my earliest memories of spending time in the being known as God’s presence: the distinct, overwhelming feeling that I did not want to be there at all.
Growing up, God always felt like this oppressive, overbearing third parent. He can see everything you do and hear everything you think. He doesn’t want you talking back to your parents. He doesn’t want you to eat too much cake. He doesn’t want you touching yourself in strange places. He doesn’t want you to spend too much time doing anything besides thinking about or talking to Him.
This, of course, is par for the course for anyone who grew up Pentecostal, Baptist, Methodist, any of the denominations that are even remotely tied to the massive, leaden umbrella of Evangelical Christianity. Pastors tell their congregants in the same breath of how good and loving God is, and then proceed to give a laundry list of all the normal and enjoyable and harmless things He doesn’t want his faithful to do.
It is no surprise that, when able to form the first independent thought of my own during early adolescence, that I veered sharply away from religion. I did everything I could not to go to church. I pretended to sleep too hard to hear when someone tried to wake me on Sunday morning. I feigned sickness and nightmares and injury. Why would I want to drag myself from bed early in the morning on one of the two days I didn’t have school just to go be lectured on how much I disappoint God?
Later on, after I had moved around and no longer saw my paternal grandparents as often, it was decided I would spend summers in the deep South with my maternal family. Sweet home Alabama, here I come.
Now, it is early June. It’s unbelievably humid here; the dry heat of Oklahoma at least doesn’t lie to me about how warm I really am. I think I’m hot in this moist, warm air, but really, I’m even hotter and I don’t even know it. Cicadas scream and bullfrogs croak in every body of water in the long, sticky evenings. Mosquitoes the size of my fingernails buzz lazily around the car as we make the drive from Birmingham to Montgomery.
There, on the side of the road, I see it: a landmark that has become famous the world over thanks to the power of the Internet. A white billboard with a simple slogan in blood red letters: GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU. Beside it is depicted a similarly red man with a scythe and a pointed, skinny tail, grinning wickedly at all who drive past his perch on Highway 65.
This is my earliest memory of the one known as the Devil: a humid car ride, a frightful billboard, a threat as much as a promise boldly announced to the entire Interstate.
The South, as it turns out, is much more in-your-face about religion than the midwest. While there are churches on every block in Oklahoma, there are triple that amount in Alabama. Currently, in the two mile drive between my home and my downtown office in Montgomery, I pass no fewer than six different churches depending on my route.
Being in the South brought me face to face with a much different flavor of Evangelical Christianity: the one that breathed fire and rained down brimstone. This Christianity roared from pulpits about sin, both yours and that of your neighbor. This Christianity told you more about the Devil than it did about God, for this Christianity wanted to go to war, and in order to go to war, they needed an adversary to do battle with.
To my grandma, everything negative became a work of the Devil: my stubborn streak, our family’s propensity to overindulge in rich foods, mine and my cousins’ tendencies to sleep for long hours each day. All of these things that my grandma detested in us were surely the Devil’s work. These were demons in us that needed to be exercised. She believed this as firmly as she believed that she drew breath in order to live.
However, my grandma taught me a very important thing about Christianity, in that she was the living embodiment of its contradictions to itself. Though she sang gospel songs and hymns constantly and prayed and called out acts she disliked as the Devil’s works, she did not go to church. She didn’t like the people that went; she considered them all insufferable, self-righteous busybodies. The only person who was doing religion correctly, as far as she was concerned, was her. Everyone else was just pretending for brownie points.
By the time I was an adult, I was left only with these two impressions of the religion of my upbringing: judgment and doom. Disappointment and damnation. Strive for perfection, but even if you manage to attain it, you may go to hell anyway for not doing even more.
So I continued to turn my back on this faith. I continued to roll my eyes and quell my temper every time some stranger handed me a pamphlet about their church or someone fervently insisted that God loved me through a drive through window. The more present it was around me, the more I resented and drew away from it.
This land that I now live in is so, so saturated in this faith. In my city especially, it seems more ground is consecrated by some denomination or other than not. Churches both open and shuttered adorn every single street. Billboards loudly proclaiming that JESUS IS THE ANSWER and GOD IS PRO-LIFE and JESUS SAVES are everywhere you turn, outnumbered only by Alexander Shunnarah advertisements.
Maybe being confronted with this constant, everyday onslaught of this faith is what kept me turning the question of it over in my head. As I grew older, I made myself let go of that resentment I had for it. I was no longer a child being dragged unwilling to assembly, where the music was always too loud and the pastor was always too boring. My grandma has passed on from this world, no longer able to verbally bash me over the head with promises of damnation and hellfire. I can finally look at this faith from my own perspective and decide what I feel and believe about it.
Even before I cemented myself in my faith of the Eldest Ten, I came to a sudden and surprising realization: God and the Devil are the same thing.
I was struggling with some of the many social challenges that come with growing older. Being an only child who clung to friendships like the legs of absent parents, it was getting harder and harder for me to feel happy for people who were moving on in life and meeting new people. I was resentful. I was jealous. And I hated that I felt those things.
That’s when it clicked. I thought about the Bible stories that had been hammered into my head growing up, the Old Testament especially. The Great Flood, the Exodus from Egypt, Sodom and Gomorrah, all these and more. God had a lot of blood on His hands back in those days. I think, over time, He didn’t like that. There were parts of Him he couldn’t reconcile, parts that were ugly and mean and, yes, evil. So the Devil was born.
The Devil is all the things God doesn’t like about himself: his vengeance, his cunning, his manipulation and deceit. The Devil takes all these in stride. He’s the shadow that the light of God casts. One can’t exist without the other.
Since I do not revere any entities imagined by man to be true gods, God and the Devil are, then, spirits. They are, at the same time, two different spirits and two faces of the same spirit. When I say “God”, I mean the spirit of benevolence, of good, of hard, honest work. When I say “Devil”, I mean the spirit of darkness, of getting even, of refusing to turn the other cheek and instead biting back with full force.
I consider myself a folkloric pagan. Pagan, in that the gods I honor are the forces of Nature itself. Folkloric, in that the traditions and spirits I interact with are those that have been passed down through my family and community for generations. God and the Devil have been here as long as my settler ancestors have been here. To divorce them completely from my practice would be doing both my work and myself a disservice.
I may have a completely different understanding of them than my ancestors did, but the key here is that I have an understanding of them. I don’t write them off as some newfangled dogma that can’t be changed or reasoned with or shaped to fit my needs. I don’t frown when people tell me to have a blessed day or say “Look at God!” when something serendipitous happens to them. I’m happy for them. I’m happy for all of us.
And that’s what a lot of people just don’t understand, especially those not living in the South. So many modern witches from similar backgrounds to mine turn their noses up at any talk of God while also shying away from the word “Devil” as if it’s a disease. They forsake the very roots of their ancestors and then try to claim that what they practice is rooted in tradition.
No one likes feeling judged. No one likes feeling wrong. These are feelings that are all too often conflated with Christianity, and I know them well. But while I may never sit in a church on Sunday morning again, that doesn’t mean I can’t keep a piece of that magic in my pocket and carry it with me on my own terms.
God and I might have agreed to see other people, but it doesn’t mean we don’t still talk from time to time.
So this looks like a good read.
Text: after half a year of work, my academic zine on the history of antisemitism & appropriation in western occult movements is done 🖤 a 22-page PDF full of citations, illustrated with historic & public domain images, pay-what-you-want (or FREE!): https://ezrarose.itch.io/fyma-a-lesser-key
I am absolutely fucking serious. The original meme, without the big red denial, is someone's attempt to fucking kill people.
There is NO SAFE DOSAGE of pennyroyal oil. Even Mother Earth News says there's no reason to use pennyroyal essential oil for ANYTHING, even topically or as a fragrance, for fuckssake! That should give you some idea about how dangerous it is!
Pennyroyal tea, plant matter in hot water, is a traditional abortifacient. It is *incredibly* dangerous, induces abortion by bringing the body close to organ failure (and frequently pushing the system right over the edge, because dosage is impossible to meter), but I would drink a gallon of it before I took a half-teaspoon of pennyroyal essential oil.
Two teaspoons, taken across 48 hours, has successfully killed someone.
Three teaspoons taken as a single dosage killed the consumer within THREE HOURS.
There is NO SAFE DOSAGE! FOR PENNYROYAL OIL INTERNALLY! NONE!
The person who made this meme is PURPOSEFULLY, ACTIVELY, trying to get desperate people killed!
Pennyroyal oil contains pulegone, which is highly toxic, particularly to the liver. Ingestion can lead initially to gastrointestinal distress such as nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Later on, it can lead to failure of the liver and kidneys, resulting in bleeding, seizures, multiple organ failure, and death.
There is no antidote for pennyroyal oil poisoning.
I’ve been thinking a lot about gods and devotional practices lately, and recently established my personal faith and tradition. So, here’s my little blurb on that process for your consideration.
The Eldest Ten
Gods.
A term, a concept, an idea that has plagued and enchanted humanity since the dawn of our time. A question as much as it is an answer: Who made these things? Gods. Who gives life to the world? Gods. Who was here before we were? Gods. Who will remain after our demise? Gods.
As a witch, I am constantly surrounded by differing ideas and theories and beliefs about deities. What it means for something to be almighty, to be sacred, to be above or without. The wonderful thing about occultists and practitioners and witches is that all of us are right and all of us are wrong all at the same time.
But knowing that all belief systems are valid in the eyes of each practitioner does nothing to confirm one’s own belief system. For years after delving into the craft, I agonized over the question of whether or not I believe in deities at all. I had come out on the other side of my adolescent atheism, wherein I shucked off the suffocating bonds of my Protestant upbringing. The idea of some unseen being in the sky dictating what was good or bad in my life filled me with rage and rebellion in those days, and I was more apt to believe there was no such thing in a world where cancer and mass shootings and stillborn babies existed.
But, as I found, there was still a deep yearning to believe in something. There was almost a kind of peer pressure to have some sort of patron deity, especially in online spaces. Everyone else seemed to have one, as was evidenced by photos of bedecked altars to Aphrodite and Loki and Mary and Pan. Everyone else got to celebrate holidays and sabbats and feast days, as shown by posts of homemade bread plated on raw wood platters and candles arranged just so with boughs of greenery arranged around their bases and chalices of wine left as offerings.
In the words of The X Files: I wanted to believe.
After all, what is a life without structure? What is another year on this planet without something to mark the passage of time and the natural progression of the seasons? What does it mean to be a magical practitioner and not have a source for that magic, that power, that something more?
So, like a frantic chef, I started throwing things at the wall in a desperate attempt to make something stick. In the back of my mind, I had placed a sort of unfair qualifier onto this exercise: if deities were “real”, then I would be able to commune with one or stumble upon a pantheon that felt right. Only in this would I be able to confirm that my magic was also real. Whether I meant to or not, I placed this bias on my investigation. If one was not true, then neither was the other.
Thus began my many disappointments. I drew tarot cards and invited communication through dreams and pendulums and signs from the natural world. I watched stars and whispered my wishes to fireflies. I kept my eyes and ears peeled for symbols and references in everything. Surely, I thought, if I ask, it will happen. I just had to be diligent.
But nothing ever came of it.
After months of waiting and searching and trying, I just felt like an imposter. Maybe I was doing this all wrong from the start. Maybe all I was doing at my altar was lighting a bunch of candles and talking to myself, accomplishing nothing. I felt jaded and unseen.
Matters were not helped by the fact that the “mainstream” deities were all from European cultures - lands of my ancestors, sure, but places I have never and likely will never see in my lifetime. There was no personal connection to Celtic mythology or the Greek gods of lore. I did not ask to be born in America, where my cultural identity is so deeply divorced from that of the people who came across the sea so long ago to colonize this land. And yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that true magic and true faith could only be based on those ancient beliefs and myths that had been trodden over and over since time immemorial. To claim to hold power and not belong to those “original” fonts of mysticism was, in my mind, to forever be a sham.
But time went on. I read more books, including Aaron Oberon’s Southern Cunning and John Halstead’s Godless Paganism, a collection of essays and excerpts from others who struggled with the question of divinity. I stopped focusing so much on broader, intangible concepts and began rooting myself more firmly in something I used to parrot mindlessly in my Asshole Atheist days: If I can see it and touch it and feel it, it’s real.
My manner of thinking shifted. I thought more on the fragility of the human race, the impermanence of our species. Like a bad case of dandruff, this planet will eventually shake us off. We are here for now, but not forever. Gods, as we know them, were invented. They did not exist before man, and they will cease to exist after the last man who knows them has died. Much like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, deities truly rise and fall with time. Some have more staying power than others, but at the end of the day, when there are no more humans, there will be no more gods.
The next leap from this conclusion, then, is obvious: the only things truly sacred, truly real and worthy of worship, are the things that were here before man and the things that will be here long after man is gone from this planet. While reading the essays in Godless Paganism, I came across one by Steven Posch that struck me right to my core. It is incomplete and imperfect, but it laid the foundation for what I now call my personal cosmology. Chief among the ideas he posits are that things are gods themselves. It was largely this passage that lit a fire in me:
Twelve
Each of us knows them intimately already,
being the ground of every birth:
Earth, mighty mother of us all;
Sun, splendid in royal self-immolation;
Moon, queen of witches, threefold mistress of fate;
Storm, called Thunder by the ancestors;
Sea, the fish-tailed lady of the deep;
the winged Winds, wide-faring;
Fire, youngest elder, fallen from heaven;
the Horned One, master of animals -
ourselves among them -
and Green his firstborn brother, lord of lead and tendril.
Reading this for the first time felt like waking up. Of course, I suddenly thought. Of course the gods are simply the fact of themselves, of their existence, whether man wills or wants it or not.
After all, is it not at least a little condescending to see ourselves (or the image of ourselves) as masters and embodiments of these things? As if a man could ever fully encompass the wrath and raw power of the ocean. The name Poseidon means nothing in the wake of a squall, of a hurricane, of a tsunami. What woman could ever bring forth and support as much life as the Earth on which we live? Demeter, Isis, Gaia - none can compare to the real thing.
And why should they? Why have we become so infatuated with mythos and archetypes and stories? These are part of us, yes, but they all pale in comparison to the lived experience of lightning flashing across the sky, of the heat of a fire pressing close to your skin, of looking up at the full moon and feeling something in your chest ache. Must there be some amorphous thing that is vaguely human-shaped behind those sensations? Can a fire not simply be a fire, can the stars not simply be stars, and in that simple, improbable, incredible existence, not also be gods?
Part of what makes deity-centric systems powerful is that they are based on faith. They say to us, “We have little to no material proof that these things are real. Reality comes with belief.” I won’t argue against that, but it is simply not for me. I distrust things made by mortal hands, things that depend entirely on our meager existence in order to exist themselves.
But my gods? My gods don’t need me. My gods don’t inherently depend on or care about anything I do or don’t do. My gods simply are, whether I worship them or not. The trees grow, the Sun shines, the Wind blows, and none of it needs my permission or attention to do any of it. If I died tomorrow, none of them would cease to exist because my knowledge of them died with me. They are the true omnipotent forces in the world. They see all, know all, shape all.
While I am alive, however, a relationship with these gods exists. I can choose, as a person with free will, to ignore that relationship. I can choose to be mindless to how my habits and lifestyle affect these very real and very alive deities. In this, I am complicit in their wounding, and therefore not deemed worthy to wield any forces beyond what any mundane person already can. I’m just another parasite.
But that’s not good enough for me.
So I acknowledge those relationships. I humble myself. I tell these almighty ten: “I am nothing without you. You are everything without me. I submit unto you. I work to keep you healthy, keep you sacred, keep you where you belong.” And I perform my acts of service.
My altar does not hold offerings, because my offerings are in the world. To the Earth and Green Brother, I offer my tending. I plant seeds and pick up waste. I try to right the balance that has been so thoroughly altered and assaulted by those before me. To the Wind, I offer seed for the birds. To the Horned Brother, I offer food for the animals in my care. To the Moon, the Stars, the Sun, I offer my reverence, my awe, my face turned to the skies.
In the end, all that agonizing and struggling for something other was pointless - however, it did finally help lead me to the truth I think I’ve always known, ever since I was a child. I grew up with a deep fascination and love for the world around me. I just had to find it again.
I’ve always been fascinated with magical word symbols such as the sator square. How did these words become magical? Why are they arranged in
The Meanings and History of Magical Word Squares and Palindromes.
For those who are unfamiliar, here are some examples:
While researching these, I noticed that the majority came from two sources: the Roman physician Serenus Sammonicus, and a 13th century Egyptian Jewish mage known as Abramelin. So how did many of these squares end up in British folk magic? Well, let's find out. Time to give credit where credit is due.
According to production designer Robin Standefer, what makes this home so endearing and intriguing to viewers is that the home is meant to be a place of refuge: “There is a whole world in this house and garden…These women are outcasts and this place is their sanctuary.”
Truly a world within itself, the Owens house is meant to withstand time and passing fads. We find ourselves drawn to this small world because it’s nothing like we see today– not in 1998, and surely not 20 years later, let alone in the real world. For being only a set on a film, the unattainability of the Practical Magic world is what makes us come back each Halloween to watch it, to keep us dreaming, to keep inspiring us to create our own magic, even if just within our homes. — “Fit For a Few Witches: The Practical Magic Victorian House”
okay not sure how to approach this gently but say that, hypothetically, you own some essential oil sprays purchased from a huge department store chain. and there is a recall because they contain deadly disease causing bacteria that has confirmed deaths and has infected and killed who knows how many people because of how rare and difficult to diagnose it is in the united states:
do not throw out the bottles. do not dump the product in the toilet. do not allow the deadly bacteria into the soil, water supply, or landfills. it is an extreme biohazard. do not throw it out. do not throw it out. do not open the bottles.
put on gloves, double bag it tightly in resealable bags, put it in a cardboard box, and give it back to any of the chain's stores. disinfect everything in the room where it was used while wearing gloves. wash sheets and blankets on hot. consider using bleach.
Customers will also receive a $20 Walmart Gift Card upon return.
Consistent with CDC recommendations, consumers should immediately stop usi
Recall Date:
October 22, 2021
84140411420 Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) Gem Room Spray Lavender & Chamomile
84140411421 Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) Gem Room Spray Lemon and Mandarin
84140411422 Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) Gem Room Spray Lavender
84140411423 Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) Gem Room Spray Peppermint
84140411424 Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) Gem Room Spray Lime & Eucalyptus
84140411425 Better Homes and Gardens (BHG) Gem Room Spray Sandalwood and Vanilla
these products are being recalled for burkholderia pseudomallei contamination, which causes melioidosis. it can infect pets.
without early treatment, melioidosis caused by the bacteria in these products has a higher than 40% mortality rate. it can easily kill you and will hurt the entire time even if you survive. treatment takes several months and involves intensive intravenous (IV) antibiotics and potentially surgery. there is a high rate of recurrence, long term injury, and disability even with survival. this is not a condition with simple diagnostics or treatment, this is not a painless condition, this is not a condition that is easily survived, and survival involves spending weeks to months in a hospital. in the best case scenario, with immediate diagnosis and treatment, mortality rate is 10%. it can cause growths on organs, septic shock, sudden paralysis, solidification of the lungs, pneumonia, sepsis, joint infection, bone infection, and so much more.
melioidosis can also remain latent for decades after bacteria exposure.
the bacteria can survive for months to years indoors, in water, in the soil, and more.
the bacteria infects people through inhalation, cuts in the skin, and ingestion. since this is an air spray, that is very bad. this is a bacteria so deadly that it and related bacteria have been used in war. do not fuck around with this
Tip for Older / More Experienced Witches and Magical Folx: Have a will and plan of action for your magical items for after you cross over and pass on. Your magical and energy filled items are ALIVE. When you cross over, they remain alive for a very very very long time. How many "cursed" items in the world are just magical tools that haven't been fostered out properly after their creators are gone? Remember your magical friends may not be able to "handle" your stuff. Perhaps that haunted (insert item here) is simply mourning the loss of the one that created it or encouraged it to grow. The tools and items need to know that they won't be left alone or misused for eternity.
I got a new piece for my altar and materials to go on and I’m in love with it 🖤 Wishing everyone a bountiful, affirming, and sumptuous witching season!
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
vaporwave
