This is a side blog that I keep pretty close track of. You can call me River. Below you will find a little bit about me and my practice, as well as some master posts or tags that will take you to specific types of posts. Feel free to message me!
Your friendly reminder that if you've traded parts of your Self to the otherworld in exchange for power you have to let your spirits dwell within your flesh from time to time, you feel that way because you are a dehydrated toad and you need to get moist in the river of power from whence you were born, hope this helps
I'm sure this was added in good faith but in light of the recent "what is witchcraft" posts and my own recent rant on asking people not to mistake witchcraft for paganism, I'd like to make it clear that this post has nothing to do with paganism and is not a shitpost.
You've probably been asked this before but I'm having trouble understanding : is the witchfather one entity with many forms, or many entities with the same archetype?
Witchfather is a title, generally referring to any male/masc entity who will initiate (or at the very least, become a primary tutelary spirit) for a person who wants to become a Witch.
Because Witchcraft is not a generic term for any kind of magic, Witchfathers therefore are not any male/masc initiatory spirits: they are initiators into Witchcraft. And this lends to there being a specific archetype.
Of this, I assume when people speak of The Witchfather they are referring to the broader archetype, but you will also see many people referring to My Witchfather to clarify they mean only a single entity and not the archetype.
Of any particular entity who can be categorized this way as a Witchfather, they may have multiple aspects or facets which are not easy to untangle, and a major part of this is IMO the preconceptions and filters of the individual practitioner.
For example, people who generally regard the Witchfather as just being 'what if Cernunnos was an emo daddy dom' may have an easier time connecting to his primeval wilderness aspects as a haunter of forlorn places, but may wholly reject that other strands such as Azazel-Cain lore are connected to the entity they are working with.
Even if a single, individual entity fits into the archetype of Witchfather, which aspects they exemplify or express will be unique to them. And of those expressions, the practicing witch may be able to see and accept them, or not.
So while I believe the most correct answer is "Witchfather is a title," both sides of your question are true: it refers to many entities within the same archetype, but those entities typically do have many forms, possibly because shapeshifting and transmuting one's form and essence is (IMO) a pretty big deal in witchcraft.
The thing is, I really am only capable of returning to something in my life if I view it as sacred. I am simply so forgetful, and there are so many new and interesting things to do.
Writing about astrology is my dedication to the skies, and photographing cemeteries and other deathly things is my dedication to the Earth. I can't fly too high without coming back to ground. I suppose now that I mention it, growing things is my dedication to the Sun.
They are sacred because they are mundane. They are mundane because they are sacred.
But it's not a demand, it is a sweet return. I don't do things every Thursday, and I don't beat myself up over the exact things somebody has recreated from their idea of a text written hundreds of years ago.
My practice flows with the tides and with the seasons. It will never look the same twice. That, too, is sacred.
As my kids get older and want to join me in my celebrations, I find that my practice has organically become moreβ¦ communal? The idea sprang from my son wanting to watch the sunset with me tonight so now thereβs a tradition of a small fire and sβmores, a game of tag trying to catch the sun, and reminding the kids that the sunlight will gradually become less each day until grandpas birthday (the winter solstice (my family likes to be born around equinoxes and solstices I guess)). Now Iβm thinking next year we can make sun masks to wear for our game of tag.
As they get older our traditions will inevitably change. They wonβt want to play tag anymore. But we may still convene around the fire pit to make sβmores, sing songs, and watch the sunset.
This weekend is going to be wild. I just finished the birthday party for my youngest and tomorrow is both the summer solstice AND Fatherβs Day. Iβm still not sure how Iβm going to balance those two yet
Yβall Iβm being so serious when I say this: go to the library for witchcraft reasons.
You can usually find books on witchcraft, yes, but thereβs also field guides on local foraging and wildlife, cookbooks, books that teach you how to craft and DIY, books about environmental protection and stewardship, books on how to use herbs medicinally, books about other religions, cultures, and spiritual practices. My favorite local library even has a seed swapping program and fantastic resources to research your own family history!
I'm a librarian, and the ability for you to continue learning, especially about other ways of viewing the world and your country, is a big part of why right-wingers hate libraries. Libraries are one of the best values for the money you pay in taxes.
Pretty much every claim of Christians stealing pagan holidays comes from sloppy scholarship and conspiracy theories. Please get your information from modern scholars instead of trusting random witch blogs/videos/infographics.
The witch hunts were driven by the early modern equivalent of QAnon, not by any credible evidence that a bunch of cryptopagans were out doing rituals in the woods at night. Most of the accusations were repurposed from accusations made against Jews for hundreds of years at that point.
Christianity and monotheism aren't the reasons you have to deal with patriarchy. It existed in polytheistic cultures long before either one existed, and it would still be here without them.
There are plenty of real reasons to be pissed off at Christians, both at present and throughout history. We don't need to make any up.
There are a lot of issues in the broader witchcraft community (not just on Tumblr dot com, but everywhere) that I think stem, in large part, from excessive fluidity in terminology. When any incantatory working is a charm, when folk grimoires and ceremonial grimoires are flattened into a single genre, when the nomenclature for a specific tradition is applied to all workings and formulas, the words lose their meaning and we lose our ability to research as effectively.
I think about this a lot. There is so much terminology that has been over-applied or changed so much in the last 15 years or so that the original meanings are basically a footnote. And (thanks, in part, to social media) it happens at a rate that is basically impossible to keep up with unless you have your finger to the actual pulse of online witchcraft spaces. I've been in online magical spaces since around 2001 (though not in any consistent way since, at that time I had to go to the library to use a computer). And, even where pockets of community different on preferred jargon or identifies or whatever, it was still consistent enough that everyone was speaking a dialect of the same language instead of different languages.
I wonder sometimes if what we experience now in terms of everything being over-applied and flattened to the extent of meaninglessness is an indirect result of the hyper-individualizing of witchcraft spaces that happened in the 2010's where it was relatively common to know five different people with all the same practice but with five very specific labels for what type of witch they were. I wonder if, because of the way social media works, when people started to abandon the use of their personalized terminologies and huddle into pockets of hashtaggable community, did the terminology that existed pre-2000's almost unchanged for decades all collectively get a rebrand?
This isn't meant to disparage social media communities or changes in terminology. It's just a genuine reflection on the changes in terminology I have witnessed in my twenty-something years in online witchcraft spaces. And since I never branched out to WitchTok or really delved into Witchstagram (I have an instagram, but it's just basically a scrapbook), I don't have a lot of context for where some of these changes originate. I generally don't discover them until later. Like when I made the faux pas of asking people what type of folk magic they practiced and they all gently put on their talking-to-the-eldery voices and told me that folk magic was just personal, non-initiatory magic.
Looks like: magnolias and lilacs; lightning, green skies, and storm clouds; dandelions and bumble bees; woodpeckers, red-winged black birds, and seagulls; rabbits eating my seedlings!
Sounds like: a frog chorus and bird song; winds blasting by; hard rain and hail on roof tops; sirens (not just on the first Wednesday); thunder directly over head; feet running through puddles; woodpeckers hunting on trees
Smells like: lilacs and petrichor; worms after the rain.
Feels like: swirling winds and electricity; spring sunshine; wet clothes and hair; the slight stomach drop from the unknown (weather usually).
Tastes like: dandelion salad and nettle soup; worms in the water (why? even the filtered water); fresh fish and turkey
Iβm tagging some new followers (hello π): @huldretjejen , @salixsociety , @corvinumbraxis
A hill I will die on is at the "choose your thesis statement then do your research" method is not an effective way to approach research. What it teaches is to use goal-oriented research to support an existing bias. If we are researching for the sake of learning, the questions we ask ourselves to guide our research must be open ended.
This is true in witchcraft spaces too. If someone looks up, for example, "why is it okay for wiccans to do smudging in their practice" they're going to find a different set of sources than if they were do look like "what is the history and significance of smudging". If someone looks for "witches don't believe in satan", they are going to find sources that support that belief; whereas the research will yield more balanced results with a less leading query.
Research isn't just proving your existing point or validating one's UPG. It requires looking at both sides, assessing, analyzing, and understanding the information presented, especially where it is going to be applied practically.
I think the deepest gift that honest history offers practitioners is not the destruction of their religion but its liberation from a kind of false dependency. If your practice only works because you believe it descends unbroken from ancient Mesopotamia or medieval Italy or pre-Christian Britain, then it is, in a certain sense, held hostage by a claim that can be falsified. And that is a fragile foundation. But if you can learn to say, βthis practice is powerful and meaningful to me, and it was assembled from various sources in the twentieth century, and those things are not in contradiction,β then you have something far more resilient. You have a practice grounded in honest experience rather than mythologised history.
This is not the same as saying history does not matter. It matters enormously. Understanding where your practices actually come from, who shaped them and why, what was borrowed and what was invented: this knowledge enriches practice rather than diminishing it. But it requires a willingness to tolerate the vertigo, to sit in the gap between what you were told and what the evidence shows, and to discover that the ground is still there even when the map turns out to be wrong.
Your Tradition is Fake. Now What? On cognitive dissonance, practitioner identity, and the strange gift of honest history by Angela Puca
A lot of people, especially in Western countries, underestimate or even ignore their own culture. Many people define culture as being of ancestral origins, and while yes that can be part of culture, culture is overall the sum of how we were raised which imprinted on our values, traditions, norms, beliefs and what we personally consider sacred. The history of where YOU come from.
My mom grew up on the coastline of California, wearing her bikini underneath her school uniform and racing to the beach with her friends right after classes where hundreds of people were out surfing, blasting music from boomboxes, beachcombing, and some even traveling from one end of the coast to another living in vans. That's her personal culture. I grew up at the base of the Applaichan mountains catching frogs in the creeks, tapping trees and collecting sap to make maple syrup from scratch, and hiking the same trails the monarch butterflies use to migrate. That's my personal culture.
Culture is so many things other than just where our ancestors came from or traditions dominated by the major religion or the majority ethnicity of that location. It includes the new and old technology, music, arts, and activities that are cultivated into our everyday lives. The local flora and fauna from the ones we can recognize right away to the rare ones where a sighting becomes the talk of the town. The fashion styles and various trends people follow or the cuisine you can find in almost any restaurant or household. Locational landmarks that anyone in that area could recognize and have gone to from malls to historic buildings to natural structures. The folklore, fairytales, and ghost stories that have been passed down through campfires, saloons, and bars of various towns, cities, and villages through the decades.
It's ways you grew up finding joy and community, how you and the people surrounding you hold celebrations big or small, the aspects of nature you've come to find familiar and at home. Where I was born and raised; The hidden waterfall with a deep enough pool to swim in and room to meditate underneath or behind the waterfall, the farmers markets and other summer events that bring my community together young and old, the preserved buildings and historical structures which people still live in and hold activities at, local folklore, myths, and stories. All of that is just as much of my culture as anywhere else, and as I grow and evolve in my life so too does my culture.
Kind of a random post for today, but as we go through the more Christian-centered holidays I see the phrase of "it makes me sad I don't have a culture" because so many people's ancestral origins are lost in the modern age. While it's cool to admire the very unique and widespread cultures that belong to other countries, it's important to recognize what culture actually means and ways in which we ALL have cultural aspects and personal traditions. They just become so normalized and localized to us we forget what they are!
I'm a big fan of working with the land, and one of the easiest ways to do so is by gathering your own plants. This is also free! No having to stop at an occult/metaphysical shop to pick up that random plant you forgot you needed. I will be making individual posts on different plants that can be foraged in my own bioregion, but first we should go over a few tips and housekeeping notes about foraging and witchcraft.
First thing I want to get out of the way is that not everything you find outside is going to be safe to put in your body or even touch. On top of that, not everything that is safe for someone else is going to be safe for you. We each have different bodies and how we react to something will not always be the same. When you first start foraging, it's important to have a guide book that will tell you of any safety measures to take when dealing with a plant. Some will interact with medications in ways that are not healthy, some have fluid that can make your skin photosensitive, and some... some people are just allergic to.
When it comes to medications, you can find contraindications (when not to ingest something) with a quick google search of "[plant name] contraindications." Generally this will give you a safe answer, however always check with your doctor if you are unsure. Better to pay for a consultation than a hospital visit.
Some risks come from the environment that the plant grew in. If you are foraging near train tracks or buildings that could leach lead into the soil, the plants will pick that up as well. Contaminated soil and pesticides sprayed onto the plants can also lead to health risks. Be very mindful of where you are foraging.
Some plants that are safe will also have toxic look-alikes. A famous look-alike is wild carrot and poison hemlock (thank you Oregon Trail video game). Unless you know what characteristics you are looking for, it's very easy to confuse the two plants. One is a delicious snack, while the other is highly toxic (the poison hemlock), to the point of causing muscle death and kidney failure. This isn't to scare you away from foraging. Only to drive home the importance of making sure you know what you are gathering.
*credit to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture
I am a resident of the United States so these will be more geared towards that country. It would be to your benefit to look into the foraging laws of your own country/state anyway, as it can still differ. The majority of states in America prohibit foraging on public lands, which makes it really hard for those who don't own their own property. If you live in Alaska and Hawaii, however, congratulations your local government allows it. Even among those states that do allow it, there can be designated areas where it's not allowed such as a nature preserve. Breaking these laws tends to come with a hefty fine and possible jail time, if caught. Though these laws are hard to find with a quick google search, especially for a specific area.
The laws in the United States prohibiting foraging are generally colonial, imperial, classist, and racist (surprise, surprise). Foraging was protected by law well into the 1800s (except for Native Americans who were pushed off their ancestral hunting and gathering grounds), even when doing so on another person's private property. After the Civil War, many newly-freed African-Americans would sell their foraged and hunted goods for an income, while also using the practice to become self-sufficient. The southern plantation owners needed this system to go away so they could chain what used to be their "property" to their old line of enslaved work. Starting with criminal trespass laws. Eventually anti-foraging laws spread to the average white rural American. Outside elites began to believe that the "backwards" people of the countryside, who made a subsistence living off the practice of foraging, fishing and hunting, could not be trusted with the stewardship of the land; using "conservation" as a way to "protect" it from the people who lived there (Linnekin, "Food Law Gone Wild: The Law of Foraging" p.1008-1014).
I do believe we need to protect our resources and lands. However, foraging can be regulated, not outright outlawed as it is. Learning about the plants and animals that live around us and can help us in our lives, leads us to learn more deeply about their role in the environment and just WHY we should protect them...
All this to say, look into your local foraging laws (and how local law enforcement actually enforces them, if they do at all) and then you can decide if you want to follow them or not. At your own risk.
There is a lot of talk in foraging communities about invasives vs. natives. Sometimes even bringing in naturalized plants. So let's talk a little bit about what these words mean in ecology and how this may effect your foraging habits.
Invasive and naturalized plants have one thing in common; they are both transplanted outside their natural ecosystem. A plant that is invasive in one place, can be naturalized in another. What matters is the impact the plant has on the ecosystem it has been transplanted into.
Invasive = Β plants or animals that harm regional ecosystems.
Naturalized = plants that have successfully established and reproduced in a new environment, integrating into their new home without inflicting ecological harm.
To make things a bit more complicated, let's introduce the 10% rule. According to the Huron River Watershed Council, "the '10% rule' postulates that of all species introduced to a region outside of their native range, only 10% will survive to reproduce in their adopted environment. This 10% of non-native survivors are often called 'naturalized' plants. Of that 10%, another 10% (or 1% of the original non-native transplants) may thrive to such an extent that they dominant their new home, out competing their native neighbors. These prolific competitors are known as invasive species."
So what makes a native plant? The US Forest Service defines a native plant as "plants [that] are indigenous terrestrial and aquatic species that have evolved and occur naturally in a particular region, ecosystem, and habitat. Species native to North America are generally recognized as those occurring on the continent prior to European settlement."
Some native species can be endangered due to habitat loss from agriculture and/or competing invasive species. It's good to have a list (many state DNR (Department of Natural Resources) will have a list available on their website) printed so you know which ones should be cultivated in your garden if you wish to work with them. Avoiding these and working with invasive species can help with conservation efforts as well. Native species can still be worked with in the wild if they are not endangered.
You'll often see witches giving advice about asking the plants permission before harvesting. This is from the belief that the plant has a spirit, an animistic belief. Asking permission to harvest isn't the only way we can forage mindfully and with respect to the plant. The way that I do this is by following the Honorable Harvest set out by Robin Wall Kimmerer (a Potawatomi botanist, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry) in her book "Braiding Sweetgrass."
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking and abide by the answer.
Never take the first, never take the last.
Take only what you need.
Take only what is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have been given.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
The first rule really helps you to follow the rest of them. Know the plant. Walk by it several times, offer water even if you aren't taking something, say hello. These plants are our neighbors and when we harvest we are asking for their help.
Each plant will have it's own method of harvest to minimize the harm done to it. Some you have to pull the whole thing up, but there are ways to repopulate it. It's so individual that I couldn't add it to this post. Hopefully what's written here can help you keep a few things in mind when going out and learning about your local flora.
Foraging can be a great way to connect with your land and learn about it. Getting your hands dirty and making you feel as if you are a part of the landscape. Hopefully the first couple of sections didn't scare you off. Get a couple of good guidebooks for your region (the local library is a good place to start) and you're good to get out there and start identifying plants you want to work with!
Saw this video (love Alexa Nicole) and thought it added a good summary of what Iβve been feeling lately about foraging. Relates really nicely to this post.
