Magick From Scratch

Wizard, Autistic Parent With Two Autistic Children, Miscreant, They/Them

[magickfromscratch]

Traumanado -- Noun

When two people trigger eachother, due to past trauma, in a big loop, until they are fighting.

When two people with the same trauma talk at length and manage to worsen one another's anxieties about the outside world.

[magickfromscratch]

Here's a really simple magical act that I have found to be ridiculously effective.

On one side of one sheet of paper, write out your boundaries with the spirit world.

Examples include:

I do not consent to any "spiritual lessons" which have not been explicitly discussed with me.

I am not "up for grabs" by random deities passing by. There is no relationship unless I consent to it. I work with the following deities...

I do not require any additional suffering, and I do not consent to it; life is hard enough, thank you very much.

If you want to "help," maybe get me more money. If you want to hurt, may I recommend one of our country's billionaires?

My spiritual goals are x, y, and z.

I came to this reality to X, and not to Y.

Add any terms you like, just stick to one page, and keep it legible.

Then just stick it into your wallet and forget about it. I have a wallet phone case, and some people believe that the phone is a magical object. When off, it's a black mirror. When on, it is full of electricity (bottled lightning). And it is definitely a portal of a kind. But I think just having it on your person all the time is sufficient. When spirits approach, point to the paper. If need be, take it out and read it (doing this before entering a magical gathering is also helpful).

[magickfromscratch]

Don't kill your gods.

Yup. Time for something inflammatory.

Imagine a furniture designer. They have an idea for a great new table. It lives only in their head for now. They have not yet drawn it. No one has yet criticized it.

Any artist will know that what winds up on paper isn't quite as perfect as what they saw in their head. But yet, if it stays in your head, it's not real. So the furniture designer creates. Now people find fault with it.

Everyone has a different idea of what "perfect" means. So the design is loved by some and hated by others. But it is still perfect in a way: it has no specific color or size yet. It can't be too big or too small for a kitchen.

Then, the table goes into production. It has sizes and colors, with which certain people find fault. Not perfect because it's green. Not perfect because it is too small.

No one has used it yet. It still lacks the little bumps, scrapes, and stains that it will acquire from human contact. From being loved, somewhere.

From perfect to imperfect is a spectrum, and imperfection is the cost of living. Of interacting. Of being loved.

Now let's talk about stories. Now, you are alive. You can make choices. You get to tell your own stories. People listen.

When you die, you no longer make new stories. You cannot tell them. Everyone who remembers you tells your stories for you; they make edits to suit the dignity of your memory. If you were very important, generations who no longer remember you make even more -- they edit your values, your politics, they scrub away flaws. In essence, this is a kind of decay. Just like your body decomposes as bacteria metabolize it, the deeds you did are metabolized by culture.

What does it mean to call the gods "perfect" and to deny any evidence to the contrary? They are edited, politically and theologically, to match some imperfect clergy's cultural ideas of perfection. They no longer produce new stories. If new ones are made, they are discredited. They are too "vast" to interact with. They are no longer in a relationship with humanity. They are not loved. Not really.

To push someone higher is to push them away.

Many people have conversion experiences. They have visions. They talk to someone on the astral, maybe, and see miracles that flow from that relationship. Then, they become pious. Priests curate and correct their experiences. Eventually, the experiences stop.

The god is no longer a person, but a political tool. They cannot speak, and they have no ability to create or tell their own stories. They are vast. They are everything to everyone. They are nowhere in particular, and yet everywhere.

They are dead.

That is not praise or kindness.

[magickfromscratch]

Hi! A quick note - the post you reblogged about coughing to help you survive a heart attack (often called “cough CPR”) isn’t true. Very easy mistake to make. There’s more info in my pinned post. Hope it clears things up, and have a lovely day! <3

Thank you so much! I had no idea.

[magickfromscratch]

One of the things that haunts me to this day is the sheer number of people I have met throughout my life who thought that by being mean, they could prove spiritual superiority.

"I am cruel and am better at making people feel bad than everyone else." ---> "Therefore, I am spiritually superior."

How do you miss the point THAT hard?

[homunculus-argument]

"Can't pour from an empty cup", but it's about your parents trying to teach you to respect them when they've never respected a single thing in their entire lives.

[rebel-hunk-enjoyer]

Learning from child themed media that respect is a two-day street and you should treat others the way you want to be treated and then your parent tells you do shut the fuck up "because they said so" and you realize at a very small age that there are rules for children and rules for adults and the entire world is built on unequal ground.

[homunculus-argument]

The price and cost of loyalty is loyalty, and the price and cost of respect is respect. If someone wants your respect but you won't have theirs, you're getting ripped off.

[magickfromscratch]

“Because you’re difficult, and I am tired.”

I’m avoiding my ex.

I spent decades with this man. He was kind, and he was cruel. I set boundaries and he ignored them. When I brought up grievances, he made extremely coherent arguments about why he was allowed to act the way he did.

If he hurt me, no he didn’t. If he did, it wasn’t that bad. If it was, it couldn’t be helped. All he wanted from me was for me to be “good enough” by ceasing to be myself, and becoming who he wanted me to be. In his mind, he was always in the right.

And I can’t help but think about people who frame deities *exactly* like that. That the hurting will stop when the practitioner becomes good enough. That the gods have the right to violate boundaries. That you can’t control them. That they have to be that way, to help you stop being who you are, so that you can become someone they like better. I have heard this story from too many damned people. It. IS. Abuse. It hurts. It does damage.

But the important question, with my ex, after a time, wasn’t “how could he do this?” Or “does he have the right to act this way?”

It was how much it hurt, and whether I could survive it if I stayed. And I couldn’t.

For a time, there was no safe way to leave. So I lied to myself about how bad it was. I made excuses. That was how I survived.

And what I eventually did, to get out, was to turn into a grey rock. To emotionally disengage entirely. It worked. He filed for divorce, and now I am free.

If you have priest people telling you that god, or the gods, won’t let you leave? Become uninteresting. Do the absolute minimum. Feign benign incompetence. If you can’t leave physically, leave *emotionally*. And when they get bored of you, slip out the back door.

That’s how you escape narcissistic abuse.

[caspercryptid]

I feel like not enough people realize that people under enormous strain act really really fucking Weird

[caspercryptid]

If someone is doing things that don't make Sense, try to understand that it is entirely possible that their brain is probably under an enormous weight and fracturing under the pressure. People who have been stabbed will sometimes talk a circle around the fact that they've been stabbed because stress and shock prevent you from recognizing the distress you are in and what you need to do to seek help for it. PTSD will do this also. You will find yourself repeatedly jamming a bag of frozen fruit into the same spot in the freezer where it doesn't fit and keeps falling, over and over and over, focused on nothing but that bag. You will decide that a beanbag chair is 10000% necessary to your life. You will lose your entire shit because you stubbed your toe on a table and that means the whole setup of your furniture is wrong. These are largely harmless examples. People under strain will also hurt themselves and others. Cornered animals bite. And it doesn't heal the bite to go "Hey, are you okay?" But it might get you to an animal that stops biting, so you can start to heal. And before you had an animal that bit, you probably had an animal that kept doing shit you didn't understand as stress signals

[caspercryptid]

Mental illness is Off-putting. Trauma and stress make people hard to be around. There are no perfect victims. If your framework for someone under pressure are people who cry photogenically at home in the bathroom or at night when everyone else is asleep and then wake up and act like they're fine then you will fail to recognize it when your coworker who's normally really nice suddenly blows up on someone for leaving forks in the company sink.

Everyone is going through shit. And it doesn't make it okay for them to treat others badly, but it also sometimes makes it difficult for them to recognize that they're treating you badly, like the person on the phone with 9-11 who no longer realizes that he's telling the operator about his day and not answering questions. When your friend of ten years who has a new boyfriend suddenly starts being a massive bitch to you about your weight maybe she's just being a cunt, or maybe she's internalized some bullshit. You don't have to take that, but you Can go "Hey, what the fuck?" And that is often more helpful than you realize. It is easy to assume that someone who does something cruel is acting with intent, but especially in cases where someone's behavior changed in a short span of time, they aren't, any more than the person who is convinced the beanbag chair is going to fix them.

You don't have to give people endless chances. But you should give them at least one chance. Because on your worst week, it's going to be you crying at your friend's birthday party because she ran out of chili before you got to have some, and you're going to want some grace for yourself.

[acertainmoshke]

All of this and also, sometimes you just cannot control your reaction even if it’s harmful or mean. Which also doesn’t make it acceptable to treat people poorly, but it does tie into the give people a second or third chance and communicate before deciding they’re just terrible now

[caspercryptid]

Absolutely! I have PTSD myself and often have extremely intense emotional reactions I cannot control, and in the throws of those sometimes i say and do things that don't make sense— i'm not talking about physical violence or manipulation, my thing for a while was demanding absolutes like "never leave notes for me" and creating invisible rules that my husband tried to follow until too many of them contradicted each other. It's the thing you do after the knee jerk reaction that determines who you are. You need to be able to recognize your own behavior when someone points it out, and to start paying attention to and rectifying it. I love my husband! I never intended to create a secret operating manual for my mental health! And I might not have been at fault for what my ptsd symptoms made me feel but I Am responsible for managing what I do with that afterwards. Sometimes i still jump to making ridiculous demands, but because I've become aware of that, these days I go "wait. Hold on. I'm doing the thing again. Give me a second".

Sometimes that's all it takes.

[magickfromscratch]

Essential Rules for groups:

Don’t be a dick: Do not use your big emotions to hurt other people. If you notice that you are having a big emotion, step back. Do not attempt to communicate until you are calm. Do deep breathing. Use grounding exercises.

Don’t be a weenie: when you have a grievance, once you are calm, formulate that grievance into an “I…” statement, not a “You…” statement. Not, “You’re a control freak,” for example, but, “I feel really minimized when you give me orders. I would appreciate if you would frame your ideas on a more open-ended and less directive way.” Or, “I feel unsafe when you frame that in and if/then/or else kind of way. I want to hear your ideas, but I don’t do well with things that feel like ultimatums.”

Don’t be a tyrant: If you feel passionately about a subject, ask a framing question, and let everyone give their perspective, rather than trying to insult or frighten people into agreement. It may feel efficient, but it’s invalidating to others, and builds resentment. Your group will fracture.

Remember that people are people: No one is perfect. No one is the exemplar. Putting someone above or below you is pushing them away. People make mistakes (see rule 2). People have skills to teach, and roles to play. That doesn’t make them greater-than. It may feel “respectful” to treat an elder like they are better than you, but this may make them feel isolated, and serve as a barrier to treating them with compassion. This is how sources of knowledge are lost — through burnout.

Don’t destroy people: It’s unavoidable that people feel jealousy, especially in this society. Remember that no group or person can build and think up everything. When you tear talented people down, you are depriving the broader community of resources, new ideas, innovations, and other ways of being. This impoverishes all of us. Find ways to self-validate, instead.

[magickfromscratch]

People like to debate about which oppression is the root oppression, or the oppressioniest.

And I understand that all bigotries must, on a personal level, be unpacked and understood, if we are to get better.

But on a movement kinda level, I dunno if this is a helpful discussion.

The most important thing is to understand that White Supremacy isn’t just about being white, that it demands heterosexuality, an able body, and immutable binary gender roles.

The root, if we must find it, is that a bunch of people really did just say, “here is the hierarchy for who gets to use whom. Here is who it is ok to threaten and subdue. This is who is master, and who must obey.”

When you hear someone lament that comedy is dead because there is no one left who its ok to be cruel to, that’s pointing the root of the problem. Why do we value hierarchical cruelty?

When you get into a discussion about who is allowed to commit evil, that’s pointing at the root of the problem. Why would some people get a pass on atrocities?

[magickfromscratch]

“We gods don’t turn humans away for being assholes. That’d be like a hospital turning away patients because they’re too sick.”

[magickfromscratch]

I feel like what needs to exist is a Big Book of Magical Problems and Things to Try.

I’m Tired All The Time, Am I Cursed?

1. Have you been drinking enough water? Did you know you need more water if you weigh more? 80 ounces of water is fine if you weight 160 lbs. If you weight 200 lbs, you need 100 ounces of water. Chronic dehydration can cause exhaustion, body aches, feeling yucky, and poor quality sleep.

2. Does your job suck? Are you stressed out constantly? Are you doing enough to manage that stress? Like meditating, exercising, doing rage rooms?

3. What about your home life? Is it toxic? Are you setting appropriate boundaries with the people you live with?

4. Have you tried doing a ray cutting to remove the influence of people who might want to control you?

5. If you did all these things, and there is no improvement, might you have a chronic illness? Have you taken inventory tests for depression, EDS, autism (which can come with sensory burnout), or similar?

6. Ok, we’ve ruled all the above out as a cause. Now let’s start to look at themes in your ideation and dreams. What, in your daydreams do you not seem to be able to control? What themes do you see in your dreams? What stories do you tell yourself? What pain have you suffered that feels invisible and like it needs to be seen?

7. Ok, none of that helped. Time for an exorcism.

And, like, there would be an entry for every common magical problem. In each case, solutions to try would start with the simplest explanation, and things to try, and slowly increase the level of difficulty or metaphysicalness, until the problem is solved.

To be clear, I am too tired and busy to write this.

[magickfromscratch]

Narrative is a container for the ineffable.

We tell ourselves a thousand stories, and reject the ones that don’t feel like our lived experiences.

Be skeptical of the stories you tell yourself. And remember: desiring to hurt others who are not an actual threat to you isn’t normal. The people who treated you that way are deeply broken.

[tomfoolerytotality]

Superman isn't woke. You're just so evil that you see a man doing acts of kindness and you think it's a targeted political agenda

[otakuvampyre]

This but for people this post is talking about. 🤣

[laikaspeaks]

Get peer reviewed, bitch.

[magickfromscratch]

Same, but re: the divine.

People expect gods to be cruel because they can’t imagine insisting on using power for helping instead of hurting.

[honeebeeyellow]

I was tagged by @sisyfigs to do lil picrew

This was a cute way to spend my morning! Tagged peeps no pressure just a bit of fun if you're feeling like it!

@bell-swamp-fitzjames @ardentanchor @miscflowers

[miscflowers]

OMG TY FOR TAG

i have less tattoos then this but i am Getting There

@secretlyofthefeywild @tadofvylad @the-maddened-hatter @cuttingroomfloorofmemories

[the-maddened-hatter]

thank you for tagging me!!!

It let me do my strabismus, very cool!

@sparklylovegiver @autistictrekky @shadowinthefire @imposterzoe @jenninova @digital-magus @a-walking-fandom-reference @a-better-son @garlic-the-gnome @potsiefaerie @silverdreams0 and anyone else who wants to play!

[potsiefaerie]

They let me have bug antenna!!! And two hair colors, or I probably would not have done it 😂

But there was like a year in college where I just constantly had weird bullshit on my head - fascinators and deelyboppers etc so I am feeling nostalgic now 😂

Tagging.... @androsthechill and @emmachillbert and @crypticcripple and @beautifulbearinatutu and @gefdreamsofthesea ? I cannot recall who has done picrews in the past so if y'all don't, sorry & skip, and whoever I forgot pls consider yourself tagged 😅 the braining is not going well today

[androsthechill]

Proportions are a bit off, but this will do 😊

Tagging @arethinn , @magickfromscratch , @hinya-o-elena , @endreal and whoever else wants in. 😊

[magickfromscratch]

“Human” and Fae souls, respectively.

[magickfromscratch]

"What if autism were a magical tradition?"

"What if a magical tradition was autistic... and sexy?"

-- My covenmates, describing what we do.

[magickfromscratch]

I am having, like, a super rough time. I don’t need to get into it, but there is no “just” about divorce. The better your reasons for getting divorced, the truer that is.

I was thinking, today, when I was younger, my mother ragging on people who needed mental noise to drown out their own thoughts, saying that this was why society was so unenlightened, and why people couldn’t tap into their psychic senses, because they didn’t want to be alone with their own thoughts.

And now, I’m like. Yeah, mom. Trauma does that to people. There is no singular part of my life that has not righteously sucked. A combination of growing up lower class, being neurodivergent (and being severely bullied as a result), and having a narcissistic parent, led to poor self-esteem, and me latching on to people who chose to mistreat me. My husband was just the latest in a very long line of people who chose to mistreat me. And divorce is digging that up. All of it.

Does not wanting to be trapped with those feelings every minute of the day make me a less spiritual person, mom?

I don’t think we’re less spiritual for needing to turn up the tv a little louder when the trauma gets big.