þe olde curiosite shoppe

blog for anything related to paganism, witchcraft, general occult topics

[magpie-maybe]

So, uh. If I visit a cemetery, and leave a couple offerings, and bury a petition to Mars at the war graves, and when I come back to the offering I left near the entrance there is now a freshly dead and partly-eaten bird there... that's a good sign, right?

...Right??

[magpie-maybe]

✨Here is a fun little survey for anyone who wants to participate. You do not have to be tagged or receive any asks to join. You do not have to be a @pathandpractice tag member to participate. It is not an ask game; just a good, old fashion myspace-style survey. Just copy this post questions, post your answers, and (if you feel like it) tag a few blogs. Please keep this description and credit to @pathandpractice when reposting. ✨

If your magic had a soundtrack, what would be its theme song?

'Walk on By' by Dionne Warwick.

What’s the weirdest substitute component you’ve ever used?

Willow leaves in a curse. While I'm away at university most of my usual components aren't available, and there's a few willow trees on campus, so… It worked, anyway.

What’s a superstition you don’t believe in?

The Wiccan Rede/Rule of Three. If that were true, there wouldn't be so many successful evil people in the world. You get what you give because other people give it back to you, not because the universe is keeping a balance sheet.

What’s your most chaotic spell outcome? How off-target did it go?

I did a spell for good health for friends and family. Within the next forty-eight hours, four of my loved ones got sick, and most of them had been nowhere near each other. Still my worst backfire to date.

What’s something "completely mundane" that feels magical to you anyway?

The moon and stars moving in the night sky. Like objectively I know they move, I know how it all works, but it's still crazy to me that you can look up an hour later and everything's in a different place!

If your intuition had a voice, who would it sound like?

It's my own voice.

What kind of magic do you think you are/you would be bad at, and why?

Blood magic. I faint at the slightest prick of a needle.

What’s a sign or omen you completely misread at first?

The first spirit I worked with had to basically beat me over the head with signs until I finally registered them. The sign that eventually did it was two snowberries and a feather arranged in a smiley face in the middle of the ginnel I walked through every day.

If your altar could judge you, what would it say you’ve been neglecting?

I don't have an altar. I'm hither and thither a lot, so when I need to do some spellwork I just clear a temporary space on my desk or windowsill. Any altar I made would have to be taken down and remade like twice a month, and I can't be arsed.

What fictional universe would your magic thrive in?

None that I can think of. It's designed to work in this one.

What is a witchcraft-related hill you will die on?

Shut your mouth about your work until you've completed it. Applies to a lot of areas of life.

What’s a habit you have that accidentally turned into a ritual?

Drinking tea. Components, intention, focus, action — that's a spell right there.

If your could take the shape of an animal for a day, which one would you choose?

A crow. I want to see the world from up above, and I want to know what they're gossiping about.

What’s something you’ve outgrown spiritually, but still feel nostalgic about?

I don't really think I have this. I've only been practising for five years or so.

If your magic had a moral alignment (chaotic, lawful, neutral), how accurate would it be?

True neutral. You can do whatever you want forever.

What’s a belief you held early in your practice that makes you laugh now?

The idea that spells had to have a verbal component, and those words had to be poetic or rigidly structured. I prefer to write my petitions, if language is needed at all.

If you could bottle and save one feeling for spellwork, what would it be?

That little horrified thrill when you've just said something you really, really shouldn't have during an argument.

What’s your “this shouldn’t work, but it does” method?

You don't like someone? Write out their name and throw it in the bin. Get out of my life with the rest of this trash.

What’s the most aesthetic over practical thing you’ve done in your practice?

Bought a bunch of tiny spell jars. I can't fit much in them, but they look very cool and witchy when filled with mysterious powders and sealed with candle wax.

If your practice had a warning label, what would it say?

'Fire hazard.' I love my candles and incense.

What was the first magical/witchcraft book you ever read?

I think it was Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft.

[likethestars-chasethesun]

I'm glad you all are very normal about your interests. Very healthy, very demure. I, on the other hand, am entirely convinced that I need at least five hundred and eighty nine years of life on top of the average human lifespan, just to catch up with my TBR list.

[senhordiabe]

I'm just gonna go back to crocheting. I haven't seen shit. I haven't known shit

[magpie-maybe]

Alright, that's all the readings I'm doing today. Everyone who has sent me a message or ask that I haven't answered yet will get their readings tomorrow or Sunday. And thanks to everyone for being respectful and polite with their messages :)

[magpie-maybe]

Hi i’m DDM☀️, I was wondering if you could tell me what my crush LF thinks of me? Thank you in advance!

Here are your cards.

Five of Swords Reversed — You seem to be caught in conflicts you don't want. Maybe you put your foot in it quite often — your mouth is faster than your mind, and it gets you into trouble.

Temperance Reversed — You're a bit of a mess. Immature, impulsive. You act in haste and repent at leisure.

Four of Pentacles — You're careful with your resources, though — you know how to stretch a budget. You also seem quite guarded, despite your loose tongue. A bit of a loner, maybe.

[magpie-maybe]

Hey, may I ask for a free reading? I would like to know what to expect in the near future. Thank you, Natalia

Here are your cards.

The World Reversed — Something will lack a satisfying conclusion. Likely something you've been working on for a long time, you've been dreaming of its culmination, and now that you're finally here it feels like a bit of a damp squib. You're not sure what to do with yourself, not sure where to go now that this thing you've invested so much of your time and energy into has ended. What do you do now? What even *is* there to do?

The Fool — Well, you start a new project. Something that fills the void of whatever you had going on before. It's probably a series of small things, rather than one huge thing like you previously had — a series of intoductory classes for a host of hobbies and skills, regular short trips and days out, a string of first dates — dabbling, not diving. It's a welcome break while you wait to find your next all-consuming passion.

King of Swords — During the dabbling, a new person enters your life. Someone mature, level-headed, a respected authority figure. This may be a mentor, likely one you met through your current self-discovery phase, or it may be a spirit or god, in which case it would be Saturn or someone of a similar nature. Whether divine or mortal, they're there to guide you towards the next stage of your life, and with their help you'll find your new "everything" project.

[magpie-maybe]

Hi, can I get a free reading regarding my Future spouse’s turn-on’s? Thanks in advance 🧸❤️

~ C

Sorry, I'm not comfortable doing readings of a sexual nature.

[magpie-maybe]

Hi may I have message from mother Hecate? Thank you! N.V.W.

Here are your cards.

I'm quite sure that the High Priestess here is Hecate herself. The rest is your journey alongside and around her.

We start on the bottom left with the Page of Swords. This is either you when you were a little younger or you now — young, eager to prove yourself, perhaps a little foolhardy.

Then you mature into the Knight of Swords. Enthusiasm refined into confidence and bold action. You're self-assured now, and you're doing well, though may have lost touch with the emotional and spiritual side of life.

Next, the Wheel of Fortune reversed. A real bolt from the blue — strikingly bad luck, a freak accident, or some forgotten problem from years ago suddenly appearing to bite you in the ass. Whatever it is, you can't prepare for it, you just have to try and surf the tsunami wave.

Finally we have the Hanged Man. Whatever misfortune befell you with the Wheel, you came out the other side of it having achieved some measure of peace and greater enlightenment. There's a return to how you were as the Page — the cards are on the same level — but now you're older, wiser, and more mature than you were before. Remember that you're not going in circles, you are spiraling upwards.

This whole journey is centred on Hecate, the High Priestess. It looks like you're going to fall away from her for a time, but you'll come back to her after you've grown.

It's not really a test, more of a rite of passage. Diamonds are formed under pressure, iron turns to steel in the heat of the forge, that sort of thing. It's going to be tough, you may want to give up, but trust that you can make it through whatever lies ahead. All of your experiences, good and bad, will shape you into the best version of yourself.

— Magpie

[magpie-maybe]

Bored today, message or ask me a question and I'll give you a tarot reading for free.

[magpie-maybe]

Hey! I've been away from this account for a while, so if there's any news or gossip I missed please do let me know :)

[chingaderita]

So, question.

If you learned the water you use for cleaning, washing dishes, taking showers,etc; has bits of rust from lack of maintenance in the past 40 years, would you think this is a health risk?

Yes

No

This one is for me, if you click it you'll explode :0

Voting ended onApr 24

[magpie-maybe]

At least you don't have to worry about anaemia.

[mermaidenmystic]

Bear Stars by Galina Egorenkova

[goodnightngoth]

life is short. hex the bitch

[pagansprite]

reminder that temple of zeus used to be joy of satan and theyre fucking nazis !

if a blog is affiliated with them in any way, it's nazi shit, even if the blog or their posts don't seem like it.

like these are on their official forums

the temple of zeus website is worded carefully to avoid explicit nazi bullshit, but it's there if you know how to read between the lines.

^'forced universalism' is juxtaposed against a 'realistic truth' of race

and 'open to all gentiles' HUGE red flag bc gentile just means 'not jewish'

their ethics page, written by the author of 'upholding the white race'

the most recent account i've seen affiliated with toz/jos is ladder-of-eros

if you're like me and have a pagan side blog, remember to block them on that blog and not just on your main

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

“Your ancestors are amazed at all your spices!”

“Your ancestors are impressed that you are an educated woman!”

“Your ancestors are proud that you are thriving in spite of what society did to them and you”

It’s all very sweet! But! Necromancy! Is! Still! Illegal! Your ancestors are going back in the ground!

Stop resurrecting them to show off!

[byjove]

whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.

and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.

[lyricwritesprose]

My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.

[mutedtempest]

I think about this a lot.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.

[hyperactivehedgehog]

Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"

[dragonmasque]

Trees evolved and lived and died and did not rot long, long before the organisms that can break down and metabolize their corpses ever came along.

And now, humans are working with fungi that can safely break down petroleum plastics, and with techniques that allow us to actually recycle these materials.

The world is full of difficulties... Medical, mechanical, environmental, so much more. But the world is also full of change, and humans are capable of working with that change purposefully, intelligently, cumulatively across time and populations. There is always a value in trying, in learning, in making an effort or building a community. Even if we don't succeed, every effort helps build the support for the thing that will, even if we can't always see how.

We owe it to those who did the best they could with what they had then, to do the best we can with what we have now, so that those who will come after us will have even better, more useful, more humane tools for the problems they will face. Who knows what we can accomplish together, for each other, when we don't give up?