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poisonerspath

Drawing for Riding Plants in “ a deed without a name” by Lee Morgan. Drawings by Brett Morgan.

visardistofelphame

O holy spirits of Nine Metals living true within the heart of all magics

Three times three by nine times nine

Betwixt and Beyond

Utter the charm

IO IO RABROX SABOX WELARF IO IO

New Year, Old Spirits

#witchraft #traditional witchcraft #witch #occult #occultism #art #artists on tumblr #my art

blackthornwren

“Another sort there be, that will Be talking of the Fairies still, Nor never can they have their fill, As they were wedded to them; No tales of them their thirst can slake, So much delight therein they take, And some strange thing they fain would make, Knew they the way to do them.”

— Michael Drayton - Nymphidia, The Court of Fairy

#fae

havencraft-deactivated20200917

The answer to a young witch saying, “Okay, so how do we fly?” isn’t, “Haha, you’re so silly, witches don’t fly!” It’s hours cramped over your grandmother’s notes. It’s foul and sickly sweet herbs hanging to dry. It’s animal fat bubbling down in a cast iron. It’s an iron knife on a hardwood board. It’s a broom, made with straining fingers and sedge, handed over with care. It’s ointment aging in the dark. It’s rough fingers on goosebump covered skin under the black moon. It’s a stomach howling its displeasure at its empty state as flesh goes heavy and limp. It’s a soul, spiraling free into the sky. And it’s waiting, singing softly by their slumbering body, til they return with the dawn.

forbidden-sorcery

“The elder sorceries of the warlock and the witch-wife now exfoliate into lush growth and the forbidden sciences and mystic arts again hold sway over men’s minds—deeper secrets yet will be uncovered and the sons and daughters of men will once again learn the shadowed arcanae from the primal Gramarye of the Old Faith. Armed with the tempered sword of the Elder Magics we must now address the great task of spiritual liberation and in the name of the Horned Master vanquish all that limits and impoverishes the psyche of humanity. Beneath the cloven hoof of Old Pouck the treacherous wiles of priestcraft, false spirituality and social reaction will be ground into nothingness. Ye are Gods! Thus speaketh the Old Master. Thou art the incarnate divinity of thy Daimonic Self—thy profane pseudo-self must be utterly reversed and consumed in the fires of thy Godhead. Now the Age of Misrule is at hand—all must be inverted, turned upside down and inside-out for no hoary truism, no sanctimonious untruth, may rest unchallenged in the Court of the White Stag.”

— Nigel Jackson - Masks of Misrule: The Horned God & His Cult in Europe

owlkeyme

Painting from the Spellcraft series: Binding Spell. Sometimes binding can be used to control bad habits and foster new, positive, stronger directions - a spell of transformation. Aided by ginger root, garlic, and fennel seed.

poisonerspath

The Blasting Rod- Thunder Rod or Blackthorn Wand

An excerpt from Raven Grimassi’s “Grimoire of the Thorn-blooded Witch” in regards to the preparation and uses of the traditional blackthorn wand.

- On three moonless nights, preferably under Scorpio - Under the sky, beneath the stars, anoint the rod with Master Oil. “Be now the Master’s bolt, in this blackthorn cane. A protection unto me and my enemies a bane.”

Prick your thumb at the crossroads, and anoint the cane with three drops of blood.

“Here at the crossroads at this hour, I claim by right the Witches power. Forces of night and shadows bold, the witch’s blackthorn cane I hold.”

Various Charms of the Thunder-rod

Against an Enemy “I see my enemy’s plots and force them rend, witch’s lighting strike I do send.”

To Veil Something “Over this draw the black and misty tide. From sight and sound and touch, I hereby hide.”

To Bind Another “I set thorns against the I’ll you bring and seal you in the thicket’s ring.”

forbidden-sorcery

“Becoming is the living surge of the chthonic, the churning of the cauldron. That which is Becoming slithers through the empirical grip, the hand that attempts to capture all phenomena, to contain and name and quantify all in the frantic struggle to keep forms discrete and familiar. In other words, the mind strives vainly to achieve mastery of the wilderness, whose shadows infuse everything, both inside and out. Becoming dashes such rigorous drives. It upsets the familiar and shocks the staid. Becoming is the unbidden surge of erotic fire that immolates the ascetic’s trance of material denial. It is the disturbing nightmare that surges up from the sleeper’s unconscious. The Poetic Sense is the robust appreciation of this frustrating paradox, which lies buried in all experience. The poet understands that nothing is pure or discrete, that all things carry a trace of their opposer. Love is torturous, and this is part of what makes its bliss so sweet. The Underworld fumes with hellish visions, yet these are the very vessels of the sublime, the masks that lend shape to the ineffable.”

— Richard Gavin - The Moribund Portal: Spectral Resonance and the Numen of the Gallows

manbiteshog

thanksgiving is a holiday based on a falsified narrative full of white guilt and the erasure of history so what are some good native organizations to donate to this coming thursday

manbiteshog

organizations recommended by @loneghostkid

native american rights fund

heyday berkely roundhouse

news from native california magazine

national indian child welfare association

california indian legal services

the national indigenous women’s resource center

meshkwahkihaki

please also consider looking into funding native/tribal food sovereignty projects if you have food to donate or money to spare. friends, please add more if you know of them and have links to provide:

native american food sovereignty alliance

meskwaki food sovereignty initiative

friends of pine ridge reservation

first nations development institute

you can also buy food/gifts from indigenous sellers or donate to gofundme fundraisers made by indigenous people who need help getting groceries, paying medical bills, or paying rent. do something to help us and our communities.

britomartis

try water projects too, like the navajo water project: https://www.navajowaterproject.org/

Help DigDeep bring clean, running water to hundreds of American families. Nearly 40% of Navajo don't have a tap or toilet at home. We can fi

a lot of reservations are fucked over on water by illegal oil drilling, pipelines, or other breaches, like in the navajo rez’s case: contaminated by illegal uranium mining.

mango-habanero-autism-deactivat

I would like to put my endorsement to the Sovereign Bodies Institute, home of the database of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. The database is trans-inclusive, the data protocols follow the desires of the families of MMIW, and this holiday season, they are collecting donations to buy gifts for the families, especially the children, of missing and murdered women.

whx-m

In 1513, the Spanish invader Vasco Nuñez de Balboa massacred 40 indigenous Panamanian Two-Spirit people by feeding them alive to his war dogs.

“I saw a devilish thing,” Spanish colonialist Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca wrote in the sixteenth century: “Sinful, heinous, perverted, nefarious, abominable, unnatural, disgusting, lewd…”

…Antonio de la Calancha, a Spanish official in Lima, wrote that during Vasco Nuñez de Balboa´s expedition across Panama, Balboa “saw men dressed like women; Balboa learnt that they were sodomites and threw the king and forty others to be eaten by his dogs, a fine action of an honorable and Catholic Spaniard.” [X]

What is often overlooked about this massacre is the monumental weight of the event, it shook the continent.

This was one of the first catastrophic events of colonization, a direct and brutal declaration of spiritual war, moving like a shockwave ahead of the physical war.

This was BECAUSE they were TWO-SPIRIT.

Within decades, traveling by foot thousands of miles, news of this direct attack on two-spirit people spread all the way up into what is now called North America. This was a culturally devastating threat for many nations, as they viewed their two-spirit relatives and leaders as a divine connection to, and sacred guidance from, the Creator.

Describing his first trip down the Mississippi in the seventeenth century, Jesuit Jacques Marquette chronicled the attitudes of the Illinois and Nadouessi to the Two-Spirits. “They are summoned to the Councils, and nothing can be decided without their advice. Finally, through their profession of leading and Extraordinary life, they pass for Manitous, – that is to say, for Spirits, – or persons of Consequence.”

French missionary Joseph Francois Lafitau: “They believe they are honored…” he wrote in 1724, “they participate in all religious ceremonies, and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to be regarded as people of a higher order…

Even before seeing European invaders with their own eyes, many tribes knew of this massacre and began to ignore the two-spirit qualities in their own children, in the hopes of protecting sacred people and hiding them from invading attention. Within 200 years of this massacre, two-spirit cultures across the continent had largely gone underground, or they had hidden traditional knowledge from their own youth out of fear.

This spiritual rift between the people and their two-spirit youth only deepened with the forced assimilation of boarding schools, which began detaining indigenous children 347 years after the massacre.

The term “Two-Spirit” was coined in the 90′s inter-tribally, in the spirit of solidarity between native nations, to decolonize their internalized views of gender/sexuality and once again embrace two-spirit people. However, many are still advocating within their own tribes for recognition and respect. “Two-Spirit” is an umbrella term, similar to “LGBTQ+”; the meaning is entirely dependent on the individual’s culture to define. For some nations it’s gender based, others it’s sexuality based, and for many a mixture of both. But for all nations with two-spirit people, it was a cultural role that went above and beyond gender or sexuality and into the realm of a blessing to the people - of Creator’s mysterious divine diversity.

In many nations 2S people held esteemed and sacred roles within traditional society, such as providing insight and guidance to medicine men or spiritual leaders, adopting orphans and the elders without family into their houses, marriage counsellors and matchmakers, being legendary artists and warriors, and being highly desirable as lovers or partners because of their status and divine power. In my own tribe, mixóge were considered a blessing upon the people from Creator, a symbol of a healthy, harmonious and complete nation.

Balboa is still remembered and venerated in Panama as a heroic explorer.

“Balboa is best remembered in Panama, where many streets, businesses, and parks bear his name. There is a stately monument in his honor in Panama City (a district of which bears his name) and the national currency is called the Balboa. There is even a lunar crater named after him.”

It’s Native American Heritage Month AND recently Trans Day of Remembrance. I hope ya’ll share this and recognize the gravity of this inherited trauma for Two-Spirit people.

My grimoire page is updated! It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on this blog. School is hard! I hope everyone’s doing well!

rad-magick

“The demonisation of fairies can be illustrated, in miniature, by the treatment of a discrete class of fairy spirits: those that were described loosely as “will o’ the wisps”. It was widely believed that some fairies used lanterns, or “false fires”, to lead travellers astray at night; this was either to lose them in woods or, more treacherously, to direct them towards dangerous bogs. The creatures responsible had many names. Reginald Scot identified “Kit with the Candlestick” and “the puckle” in 1584; Robert Burton also named “pucks” as will o’ the wisps in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).25 The hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow was also counted among these spirits, as Shakespeare attested by naming him “Puck” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These creatures shared obvious qualities with the Devil. Both were false lights that beckoned the unwary from the true path. William Tyndale hinted at the demonic nature of will o’ the wisps in his commentary on the first epistle of St. John in 1531: without the light of scripture, he argued, Christians were left to “wander as in a mist, or (as we say) led by Robin Goodfellow, that they cannot come to the right way”. If Christ was the “true light” described in St. John’s epistle (1 John 2:8), then Satan was the false equivalent; and he pursued his ends through deceptive appearances – as darkness masquerading as light (Luke 11:35). Later Protestant writers linked will o’ the wisps explicitly with the Devil. In 1616, Francis Rous noted that the love of wealth “makes sport for the Devil, and thus is man most truly fairy led, even led aside by the spirits of darkness”. The theme was refined in the devotional poetry of Thomas Washbourne in the 1650s. In “Upon His Losing His Way in a Mist” (1654), Washbourne imagined himself as a wayfarer beguiled by elf-light: And till the fog was by the sun Dispell’d, I in a maze did run And ride as if ‘twere fairy ground, Or that the Puck had led me round.”

— Fairies and the Devil in early modern England by Darren Oldridge

#fae #the witchfather #witchfather

vespertinals

It was bone-chillingly cold here on the 31st. The wind roared and the trees croaked as the procession of The Wild Hunt raged on; as Frau Holle, Diana, Herodias, Aradia, or Lilith acting as Dominae Nocturnae led her retinue of the Good Folk through the night sky to the sabbat. The coyotes barked and yipped, their song keeping our livestock dog Sylva howling in defense all night.

We stayed in to bake black bread and make hag’s tapers. After harvesting dried mullein stalks — a plant with a long list of medicinal values and lore in witchery — they’re brushed (very tediously) with beeswax, and they burn like torches.

A lot of the lore behind mullein relates to its representation of the crossroads and its use in rites of necromancy. “It encourages the manifestation of spirits and communication with those who dwell on the other side.” Certain old grimoires also use mullein as a substitution for graveyard dirt in their formulae.

Burn hag’s tapers to illuminate the Mighty Dead. Last night, they led our party guests like Hekate’s torch into the woods to the stone spiral that surrounds a beech tree (a tree with lore in ancestral work and old wisdom). Candles were sat along the spiral, songs were sung, and stories were shared of those we lost this year and in years past.

Stories and memories to keep us warm in the darker months to come.

#samhain

forbidden-sorcery

“Prayerful lamentations made frequent part of [necromantic] types of work in Antiquity, and it was often the role of women to lament in sorrowful weeping to gain the attention of the dead and other chthonic spirits. The importance of weeping—and its product, tears—is also found in the greater motive of Ireland’s Brigid. Brigid holds as her day the mass of candles on the first days of February, itself a liminial time, a waxing moon as it were, in the cycle of seasons. It is a glyph in time where light is given to the dead in the form of candles, food and drink. Brigid is known for her night travels and she is also credited with the origin of the Ogham oracle in her capacity as patroness of poets. Owls, serpents and bees belong to her as do doorways and thresholds—all totems worthy of a psychopomp and necromancer. She was also associated with wells and springs as well as fires—and from this she held a relationship with the intoxication of magical waters, like med and beer. She also created the particular form of poetic mourning and weeping followed by the death of her son Ruadán, what is known as ‘keening’. Keening serves the same function as the lamentation and songs used by the goes in Antiquity… The fair inhabitants of Annwn, the sidhe or banshee, are said to be inhabited by Brigid’s soul. The sidhe could be summoned by the use of keening and were reputed to give prophecy and oracles—but also death… Brigid is, amongst many praise names, referred to as the ‘Lady of the Shores’. The shore is certainly represented by the Irish coastline—but also it refers to the shore separating the visible and invisible world.”

— Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold - The Waters of Death and the Graveyard of Stars

prairiewitchy

One way to become a witch

I get a lot of asks that are along the lines of “how do i become a witch,” and I ignore these pretty much 100% of the time. (I have a tag! You could check the FAQ! You could say please! I swear I respond to all messages that aren’t just this.)

But it got me thinking about what would be a true, large “first step” toward becoming a witch. Some people suggest working on meditation and mindfulness practices, other say working on energy manipulation or jumping right in and doing an initiation ritual. None of these are wrong answers, but to me they seem to lack the emotional and intellectual framework of (my brand of) witchcraft–there’s no connection or understanding of where power comes from, or the ethics entailed in harnessing it.

To that end, I suggest all beginning witches start out or supplement their practice with stewarding a piece of land, preferably one of or approximating a natural ecosystem. A wild corner of a local park? The dirty creek that runs behind the school? The abandoned strip on the said of the railroad? All ideal places. (That said, I’m not encouraging trespassing).

This builds a number of skills that are important. First and foremost, you’re going to learn about all the plants and animals that live on that land. This sounds tedious and difficult, but it’s very manageable if you take it one step at a time. Go out and learn one new plant a day. Investing in a field guide is useful, if you can. Journal about them, draw pictures of their leaves and blossoms even if you’re a bad artist. Knowing how to find and identify plants is one of if not the most important part of being a green witch, and learning one small piece of land is as good a place as any to start. Remember, even “mundane” native plants and weeds can help you.

While you’re out there identifying plants, you’re also gonna do some basic caretaking. Bring a bag to pick up garbage, and perhaps work gloves if you often encounter torn cans or broken glass. The same way we use meditation, shadow work and cleansing to keep ourselves and our tools clean and powerful, this allows you to see up close and improve the condition of the world around you–the wellspring and reservoir of power, in my understanding.

Also, you should start researching. Go to the library and find out everything you can about the land. Who owns it? Who used to own it? How has it been developed or changed over time? Since many of these things are a matter of public record, you might enlist your librarian to track some of it down–and befriending a librarian is always a good idea. Learning to research histories is an important part of keeping your witchcraft conscientious, informed, and able to improve and grow.

Educate yourself on any local legislative issues pertaining to it too, because your next step is to advocate. Show up to city council meetings to speak against rezone that field into a strip mall! Don’t let them dam the creek! Learning to speak passionately, informedly–and learn to take loss graciously without giving up. These skills make you more determined and more eloquent–both critical to making your spoken spellwork strong.

And here’s a final lesson–you’re not going to claim ownership, even in your head. This isn’t your land, it’s the land. You are not its privileged speaker, and you definitely aren’t there to tell others how to behave on/around it. You may feel kinship with it, but that’s different than ownership. It’s natural to feel possessive of things you’ve worked hard on, but that will only ever hold you back. Witchcraft isn’t yours, it belongs to every witch and to the world they live in.

catshapedcoffin

deerhoofandrabbitsfoot-deactiva

“CALM DOWN, Mary. I’m sure tons of witches have taken so much datura they pissed themselves, but you’re kinda ruining the Sabbat right now.”

*muffled sobbing*

“No, no, Goody Williamson is coming to fly you home. Please don’t make a scene.”

old-mother-hubbard

Witches’ Night and The 1rst of May

_______________________________

As April draws to a close and Mayday draws near, there is one more night that’s got me on the edge of my broom: Hexennacht.

I regret to say I cannot share my plans for the eve of May first, as the secrecy of it all is not only vowed upon but also impacts the potency of my actions. I can say, however: There will be wine. There will be music. And I will be cooking quite a lot.

This aside, the true reason for this post is to engage with you all!

I want to know how you celebrate the season. I want to know if you celebrate at all. What do you do on witches night, if anything? What do you do on Mayday? If you have no plans this year, have you done anything before?

Share your stories; share your memories!

Share your thoughts, and share your beliefs! It’s great being a solitary practitioner (as I know a lot of us are), but is also great to have a sense of community. That’s part of why we made a tumblr, isn’t it? To engage with each other.

If you’ve stuck around this long, but have no idea what Hexennacht is…

Read Below:

Happy Hexennacht, heathens. It's my first fire of the year. We are officially halfway to Halloween. "In Germanic folklore, Hexennacht (

etamina-amata

I live in Amish Country, so as I was growing up, I associated Walpurgisnacht more with the sunlit Urglaawe traditions, than I did witchly ones, until I was pacted. One of my favourite things was always preparing the Holle signs. I remember picking tulips and helping set them up, and how the kids were allowed to stay up late. Usually the adult in the family who had been left as ‘babysitter,’ allowed us to go over to whichever farm was having a singing that night.

My first actual Walpurgisnacht…I was a little terrified. Becoming witch had been more than a little scary at the time, and the adults spoke of Walpurgisnacht with such reverence. I was afraid of messing it all up. I remember being almost entirely silent on the car ride to the hill, which for me is terribly out of character. I remember being the youngest person there, and the fires being lit and the solemn farewell to the dark half of the year, but then I kind of don’t remember anything but laughing and dancing and falling over, until I woke up in bed the next morning.

#walpurgisnacht

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