naturalist ☆ witch

witchcraft as an art form, myths and symbolism, rituals as cognitive crafts. wonders of the world, the words and the human mind. pagan-ish, raised catholic, atheist, UU-adjacent, fascinated by religion in general. bi, neurodivergent. 29.

[naturalistwitchold]

I created a new blog @naturalistwitch i could interact with people directly (this one is a side blog, so it puts my fandom page forward...annoying) and won't be updating this one anymore. If you're still interested, follow me through, i plan to be a bit more active on the new one !

[maruki]

this remains one of the funniest scenes in this show imo 

[animentality]

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

a lot of people really seem to unironically think sexual attraction is creepy and it's making me lose my fucking mind. like the fact I got an anon telling me it's creepy to call my manager hot. "no bitches?" isn't a meme anymore you all really DO need bitches

[greeneyed-thestral]

Gaiman releasing the 11th episode be like

[princemick-archive]

Lewis Hamilton // Imola 2022

[gingerbaci]

"Peppermint Gardens 🍵" by Joe Mortell

[mypieceofculture]

Witch Aesthetics // Cactus-Succulent Witch

Requested

Bone Witch | Kitchen Witch | Moon Witch (Light) | Moon Witch (Dark) | 

Christmas Witch | Fire Witch | Star Witch | Lilac Witch | Curvy Witch

[thesorcerersdiary]

I don’t know who needs to hear this but

Do NOT cast spells for positive effects that involve:

Burning a picture of yourself*

Burning a piece of paper that anywhere contains your name*

Burning a piece of hair or other taglock*

*Unless you really know what you’re doing

I don’t know how sigil culture got people to think that burning anything = sending it off for spirits, but NO. Across pretty much every magical practice, burning involving a person = destruction. Burning as a means of generically sending things off is mainly used for offerings.

On a similar vein, do not cast spells for positive effects that involve taking a human figure and ripping up, burning, submerging in soil or water, or doing anything else to that figure that would maim or kill a real human. (unless you really know what you’re doing)

Remember the Law of Similarity. Destruction of an image = destruction of the thing itself.

[therestlesswitch]

Remember that not all witches or witchcraft comes from western traditions!

There /are/ traditions around the world, specifically thinking of the money burning rituals in some Chinese traditions, where burning = sending it to the spirits.

Magic and witchcraft aren’t imutable. burning something could have one effect for one practitioner, and a different one for someone else.

For you, personally, destruction of an image means destruction of the thing itself, but for lots of others, that’s not how our worldview or magical practice works. I’m not saying you’re wrong, all of this could apply directly to your craft, but to say things like this as hard and fast rule is a little western-centric.

I’m not part of a tradition that celebrates or venerates by burning spirit money or other paper-mache items, but it’s a super widely-practiced tradition, and to say that it will only have desctructive effects isnt accurate.

[marigoldwitch]

I agree this does not apply to every practice. It certainly does not apply to my own practice.

I’ve been a practicing witch for almost 20 years and this has NEVER been a “rule” or even a hard belief among most witches.

This sounds like some “woo woo white magic tumblr witchy” opinion.

[therestlesswitch]

Exactly. Honestly most times i see someone talking about magic like it has set rules, it’s usually white western/euro-centric nonsense, mixed with a little gatekeeping.

[bluereevesphotography]

Blossom tree

[okisouls-deactivated20220117]

Beautiful cornflowers 🦋

[mypieceofculture]

Animal Witch Aesthetics // Bird Witch

Requested

Snake Witch | Elephant Witch | Unicorn Witch | Cat Witch | Fox Witch | 

Wolf Witch | Shark Witch | Spider Witch | Scorpion Witch | Raccoon Witch

[mypieceofculture]

Animal Witch Aesthetics // Bee Witch

Requested

[black-raven200]

POC Floral Witch Aesthetic

For requests see this post.

[la-catharsis]

Luis Ricardo Falero - The Witch (painted on a tambourine) (1882)

[thorraborinn]

Probably a dumb question, but why do you think people are so focused on "proving" runic divination? From what I know about Norse magic (which is very likely a lot less than you do, so I might be missing something) divination in sagas and poems relied on other methods (like seidr rituals, singing chants, asking the dead directly, etc.) while runes were used to curse, heal, protect, etc. Yet it seems to me many ignore all that and just focus on divination. Does that just... sound cooler, or smth?

Ah fuck, I started answering this and then I forgot about it.

I think this is a great question, to be honest. I think there’s a lot that goes into this, and I don’t think it’s possible to answer it cohesively, but I think it’s important to try. I think that there are a lot of advantages that modern runecasting has over other forms of divination that contribute to its status, and it’s beneficial to us to acknowledge that even though I also think some of these things are problems.

For one thing, its popularity is self-sustaining. In my experience more people know about runecasting than know about heathenry. Before Norse society’s current moment in pop culture, it was very likely to be the very first thing a given person learned about Norse society. If you Google “runes” the first thing that comes up is Wikipedia but the second is a site that advocates it (and even worse, does so while pretending to be an academic site). So most people are probably coming into it already wrong, and then are force-fed a bunch of information that meets their expectations instead of correcting them.

We also have to consider the impact of a person’s past experiences. By the time most people learn that runecasting is not something that Vikings did, they have already done it themselves, and very likely did it with the assumption that they were taking part in a genuinely ancient ritual. That has an impact on someone. I know that I have had emotional experiences during runecasts.

And for full disclosure, a lot of this applies to me. When I make a pissed-off blog post about runes a lot of that frustration comes from memories of my own experiences of learning about how badly I’d been lied to and had my time wasted, and how much misinformation I spread myself. That last part especially can be a hard pill to swallow.

Anyway, to the extent that this describes the problem it does so only from the perspective of individuals. I think there are more systematic/societal reasons for it.

Modern runic mysticism originates in Hermeticism in the 16th century (to be more specific, a self-described Rosicrucian, Johan Bure), and is therefore not part of a Norse/Germanic tradition at all but really a branch of the Western Esoteric Tradition. In particular, runes were used by Bure as a way for non-Jews (in his case specifically Swedes, though this would be adapted to “Aryans” over time) to make the claim that Kabbalah actually belonged to them, and that the Jews had gotten it from them.

A lot of modern people have a certain idea of what “mysticism” or, like, “spirituality” I guess, is supposed to look like, and that expectation is heavily indebted to Hermeticism (and more sinister, to Theosophy). Hermeticism is an extremely broad and diverse phenomenon, and it’s one I’m only surface-level familiar with, and the last thing I want to do is disparage the entire tradition, BUT modern rune magic has in its core a universalist essentialism that goes back to the Neoplatonic roots of the Hermetic ideas that informed it.

In one sense, there seems to have always been a deep sense of inferiority among modern heathens. Modern heathenry has been marked by attempts to prove that we’re a “real” tradition deserving of respect by other modern institutions, by simulating the affectations of “real” religions like codified lists of virtues, insistence on fictive unbroken lineages, etc. This really just says that these heathens have completely internalized the western expectations of legitimacy for a religion that have been used as justification for conquest and conversion, and deny legitimacy to indigenous cultures unless they perform the expectations of their colonizers; as well as fail to actually understand the traditions that they’re trying to copy. I genuinely wonder whether we can trace this sense of inadequacy back to the first heathens to model themselves on the Roman empire such as the Franks, who copied and pasted the Roman mythological origin for themselves in order to claim that they too were the descendants of Trojans (this story spread throughout Europe, and is found in Snorri’s Prologus).

Explanations for modern rune magic oscillate back and forth between the “this is objectively true” of a linear, ordered universal time that bases its truth claim on it being genuinely ancient; and a liberal individualism (”if it works for you then it works”) that is itself encased in the universalism of everyone being a unique bounded cohesive individual rational subject. This is the dominant paradigm of modern western human society, and it should not be surprising that inhabitants of that modern western human society would gravitate toward ideas that are products of it.

But the real bait-and-switch here is that it hasn’t actually changed from being a way to seize the products of thousands of years of Jewish tradition without needing to pay respect to the Jewish people who developed and articulated it. Nowadays most people don’t even know they’re doing it, because they don’t know about the modern development of rune magic, they take statements like “the runes are the elemental energies that make up creation” or whatever the fuck at face-value because we’ve been acculturated to just understand and expect that from like New Age ideas or whatever, completely ignorant of the deep exegesis of the creation story in Genesis that it takes to explain the position of the Hebrew letters in Kabbalah.

So basically the claim of ancientness serves an important function as a narrative device that exempts people from knowing its actual inception in an act of antisemitic cultural theft, and allows them to continue to perpetrate that theft. Further, most modern people who are interested in Norse and Germanic culture actually aren’t. They have an idealized image constructed for consumption by modern Western people (especially influenced by nationalist romanticism of the 17-1800′s) and they are motivated to preserve that construction against threats like historical research.

There is one other, much less important thing I want to mention quickly: the claim of ancientness gets people out of learning any more about runes than the perfect, pristine, fully-formed elder futhark. This is probably related to 19th century Norse scholars who saw all evidence of heathenry as the degraded remnants of a once-cohesive, pure, uncorrupted original that could be pieced back together through philology. But also it’s an excuse to not learn about a tradition that actually is complicated and has depth but takes hard work to grasp.

There is more to talk about on this subject but I think this is the most important stuff.

[eldritchesoterica]

@thorraborinn​ I’m not anon, but thank you for taking the time to go into this. I’m a little confused about something, though.

In your answer, you say that the use of runes in modern divination is tied to the appropriation of Kabbalah and that runes are linked to Hebrew letters. I’m not sure if I missed it or misunderstood, but I don’t see the connection. Is there some source I’ve never heard of that made that connection?

[thorraborinn]

Yeah, sorry, I have a unfortunate tendency to skip steps in explanation if it’s something I’ve talked about before, which is especially bad practice for someone whose blog’s search function is broken.

Johan Bure was a Swedish Rosicrucian who was important in the early days of both runic mysticism and actual academic runology (though the latter is much more indebted to the Danish physician Ole Worm). He was a nationalist who believed that the “Goths” (=Swedes, and certainly not those fake-ass losers the Danes) were God’s chosen people who had preserved the original pure alphabetic technology for interpreting the fundamental structure of Creation and direct experience of the divine, and that the Jews had stolen it from them. This alphabet was, in his system, the younger futhark minus ýr, because runology hadn’t advanced enough to distinguish it from reið at the time (the elder futhark was still yet undeciphered). This was further elaborated by pre-Nazi occultists like Guido von List, the inventor of the Armanen runes, which is the tradition that all modern runic mysticism traces itself to through Nazis like Ernst Tristan Kurtzahn and later non-Nazi occultists (but who made uncritical use of Nazi occultism) like Karl Spiesberger. More recently, Edred Thorsson/Stephen Flowers has injected the narrative into modern heathenry with absolutely no explanation for how or why this narrative has anything to do with Norse religion, he simply neglects to mention that it’s fundamentally based in a Biblical cosmology and metaphysics, and Norse cosmology is so mystified to newcomers that they don’t think to be like “wait but none of this is in the Eddas.”

[dragongrowlings]

I...pretty explicitly have seen claims that the divinatory meanings come from the rune songs in the Eddas, so I must be missing some information.

[thorraborinn]

This is not only incorrect but is extremely harmful and whoever told you that is not someone to be trusted. You’re talking about the 18 rune Armanen futhark which, according to its inventor (but without evidence, like everything else he said), supposedly corresponds to the 18 magical songs listed in Hávamál (which are not “rune songs,” they’re just called ljóð ‘songs’). The Armanen futhark is a racist creation by someone whose mystical system was intended "to awaken German nationalist consciousness.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armanen_runes

[theemperorsfeather]

When I was seriously studying the runes for divination, I ended up using the old rune poems pretty heavily (as well as whatever I “got” through meditation), at least as starting points, not any 18-rune anything, or the Havamal. I know of other people who’ve done likewise.

[justgracebutnotfirst]

i’m so in love with eliott in season 6,,,,,,,,,,,