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Pagan-rooted animist folk witchcraft • ref blog • seeking primordial knowledge mobile tags

[devilsskettle]

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

[devilsskettle]

[thestolencaryatid-deactivated20]

Iranian brass amulet that renders its bearer more attractive and helps her capture and subdue a lover. The lover is symbolized as beast of burden.

[alephskoteinos]

the Winter Solstice, that is, when it sank into the abyss beneath the horizon, it entered the constellation Capricomus, the Goat. This animal therefore became the type of the god of the underworld, the Sun in the Abyss which later became identified with the idea of the Devil on account of its association with darkness and death. The Great God Pan and the Egyptian Set are identical concepts.

- Kenneth Grant, The Magickal Revival

[slewfootwitch]

I think disbelief has just as much power in magic as belief does. Disbelief is a ward in the same way that belief is a doorway.

[promiseiwillwrite]

yup a lot of my cursing sneaks in through the back door of people's willingness to believe that they are being cursed, and just turns that knob to eleven.

[lovewillbreakyourheartforever]

[blessphemy]

if you read about any biology you can quickly lose touch with what is astonishing and miraculous vs what is mundane, from animals that steal chloroplasts to become photosynthetic, to cloning technology being old hat, to trees that didn’t biodegrade for tens of millions of years, to naturally occurring lateral gene transfer between vastly different species, to the creation of gametes from adult cells, to the ability of some cancers to induce blood vessel growth, to desert shrimp that lie dormant for years, to the sensitivity of human touch receptors, to the fact that human hardware has a latent ability to see UV but their corneas block those wavelengths, to birds that echolocate and live in caves, to human skin being covered in enzymes that destroy RNA, to individual trees becoming genetic tapestries branch by branch, to life forms that gain energy from the electron potential of metals in their environments, to plants that recognize their siblings and adjust their behavior accordingly when growing next to them, to metamorphosis

which is to say. All of it is miraculous. and all of it is mundane. biology is Chaos vs. Order locking horns forever

[pointnclick]

"we live in an uncaring universe." sorry the special planet full of beauty and animals and food literally growing out of the ground isnt good enough for you. i guess

[lioness--hart]

“In the same way your heart feels and your mind thinks, you, mortal beings, are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don’t, then it doesn’t.”

~Brennan Lee Mulligan

[cryptotheism]

The gnostics believed in a version of neo-platonism where the demiurge was somewhat combined with the old testament God. And Jesus was connected to the world of pure ideas. But what did the hermetics believe in? I still don't get it

See that's the thing. We don't really know what they believed in. Ogdoad Reveals the Ennead hints at something gnostic-adjacent with a more positive view of the Demiurge. Asclepius implies they believed in a complex system of astral spirits who dispense divine knowledge after special invocations. The technical hermetica implies they believed in a systemic theory of occult correspondences between the stars, stones, herbs, and mathematics.

All of it is clearly influenced by middle and late platonism, apocalyptic Judaism, some seasonings from Egyptian folk religion, but we don't actually have very much doctrine from them. All we have is like, introductory texts and the occasional liturgy. It's clear that we are missing several pieces to the puzzle.

[cryptotheism]

what exactly the spirit spark is according to gnosis? So far I only understood (pls correct me if I'm wrong) that Yaldi took some divine nonpersonal substance and inserted it into humans; and that other eons are working to destroy his building, ie crack human beings and make them just a part of landscape again. Like the goal is to stop existing as a person and become the environment the eons live in.

The spark does not come from Ialdabaoth, it comes from the Pleroma. The divine spark is the divine nature of your soul, and the thing in gnostic thought which allows salvation. Its the part of you that can cultivate noesis and escape reality.

[deepestangelcollective]

What is this from?

[cryptotheism]

Gnosticism.

[deepestangelcollective]

I thought Gnosticism was an umbrella term and kinda just meant "knowing things".

Can you be more specific?

What branch of gnosticism?

[cryptotheism]

Gnosticism is a term for a set of Christian heresies dating back to the antenicene era. Scholars constantly argue about how exactly the term should be defined, but personally I subscribe to the view of Elaine Pagels; the Gnostics were Christians who believed that salvation could be aquired through the acquisition of mystical knowledge.

There are two main gnostic sects from this period: the Sethians and the Valentenians. Both of them share this "divine spark" doctrine. Notably, this doctrine also occurs in the later neo-gnostic doctrine of the medieval Cathars.

This doctrine specifically appears across several texts in the Nag Hammadi library. Which are a fun read if you have a free afternoon.

[kitchen-light]

“Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). […] Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved.”

— Ed Simon, from his essay “Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story”, published in The Millions, August 18, 2021

[bobdylanyaoi]

“Subverting” Catholic art? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You log onto the internet and you post about how “Wound of Christ” from Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg, attributed to Jean le Noir, c.1349, for instance, looks like a vulva because you're trying to tell the world that you enjoy Catholic art and imagery in an alternative, queer, risqué way that challenges Christian beliefs. But what you don't know is that that stigma isn’t just a vulva. It's not just a mandorla. It's not just yonic. It's actually intentionally erotic. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that around 1297, Saint Angela of Foligno experienced a vision of Christ himself, who called her to put her mouth to the wound in his side and lick the freshly flowing blood. And then I think it was Saint Catherine of Siena who drank blood and a clear liquid from the wound before receiving a ring made from Christ’s foreskin? And then graphically erotic encounters with the side wound of Christ quickly showed up in the writings of eight different mystics. And then the yonic interpretation of the stigmata filtered down through the illuminated manuscripts and then trickled on down into some pseudo-intellectual corner of the internet…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some Pinterest board. However, that interpretation represents hundreds of years and countless visions of religious ecstasy. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've come up with an idea that exempts you from Christian theology when, in fact…you're posting an image that was sexualized for you by the very Medieval saints you think you’re so different than…from “subverted” Catholic art.

[liesmyth]

@monstrousgourmandizingcats

[sixappleseeds]

[ID: Meryl Streep’s character from The Devil Wears Prada looking disdainful and unimpressed]

[bhramarii]

When the sky still felt close enough to touch,

and gods were simply neighbors we carved into stone so we wouldn’t forget them.

(Sun-headed deity, Tamgaly — Kazakhstan)

[graceebooks]

people with ocd inventing religion: listen if we just do and say the exact same thing every single time everything will be fine

[eroscestlavie]

"THIS IS GOD’S FINAL MESSAGE  TO THE UNIVERSE REGARDING THE SUBJECT OF THE HUMAN BEING TRANSLATED FROM A TECH FOUNDER’S INCOHERENT X POST," a little text zine I made last year and never really did anything with.

If you find the original X post it's based on you get a prize.

[cryptotheism]

You could probably define Gnosticism as "doctrine which disagrees with Tertullian's literal and bodily resurrection of Christ."

[cryptotheism]

Like, mainstream 2nd century Christianity really needed Christ to be meaningfully and bodily immortal. Christ came back in a way that lets him eat and bleed. Because if he can't do those things, he can't be the Messiah. The Messiah is supposed to be immortal. Bishops wanted this theological claim because it gave them clout with the rest of the Jewish diaspora. (Or something, its complicated.)

The Gnostics, broadly, are not interested in this political aim. Many of the Nag Hammadi texts interpret Christ as some sort of ghost, or spirit-body, or something closer to a trickster that speaks in riddles. Materially speaking, this sort of esotericizing would have shaped how the priesthood worked. Something closer to a middle-platonist teacher-and-students relationship. I think this was a move to try and make Christianity more theologically flexible and culturally insular.

[cryptotheism]

Elaine Pagels you never let me down

[spacedoutsheepy]

I'm having a hard time following. how does jesus coming back in body and not just in spirit legitimize the authority of bishops? wouldn't they have claim either way, being able to cite the whole "on this rock you will build my church" moment of Jesus passing authority over to Peter?

Also it's funny, I was just listening to The Gnostic Gospels the other day, and coulda sworn she makes mention of gnostics who believed in the bodily resurrection too.

[cryptotheism]

Imagine if you could claim that you met Christ, not in the flesh, but resurrected in a spirit dream. Imagine if those dreams were treated as authoritative, on par with the Gospels. Makes it much harder to centralize authority in the way mainstream Christianity was trying to do.

[hagiomoto]

[cryptotheism]

What is an example of a theological reason the Trinity has to be so fucky and complicated? I know of the terrestrial political implications of being part of various belief groups relating to the Trinity, but what makes it important to the structure of the universe that Jesus is 100% God and 100% Man instead of being half-man-half-God? Or the spirit and the father being separate, for that matter.

The first thing I tell people is consider the sacrifice. The death of Christ --within the logic of christendom-- is maybe the most important thing to happen ever. The precise nature of it is therefore of cosmological importance.

If Christ is a demigod, half man, Half god; did it lessen his suffering? Does he know what it is like to experience pain as a mortal, fallible, human being? Sure he felt pain but did he feel *our* pain?

If God the Father and Christ are continuous with each other, not separate persons, and Christ exists as a limb of the godhead, that makes a huge difference for the nature of the sacrifice. The language might be complicated, but the implication is the difference between God chopping off a leg, and god losing a child.