A Satanic observance organised by yours truly based on an idea and lore by @askingforthesun
Divider by @forlorn-crows <3
We are just over halfway between Solstice and Equinox, and some of us are coming out of a dark winter while the rest are coming in from a bright summer.
In the weeks leading up to the Equinox people around the world will prepare by starving and restricting themselves, each of them encouraged to give something up to rid themselves of sin.
Sin, the guiding hand our Dark Lord lends us. Can you imagine wilfully giving up sin?
We know that our Dark Lord tasked seven Princes of Hell with the seven Deadly Sins to help us and guide us through this human life. The sins complement our instincts; they are there to help us meet our needs, to make sure we do not neglect our earthly bodies or eternal souls.
In the next seven weeks we will call on the Princes as we remind ourselves to make room for sin in our lives.
First we call on Belphegor to help us indulge in gluttony. Gluttony is about nourishing your body and appreciating the bounty of the Earth.
Then we call on Lucifer to remind us of our pride. Pride is about knowing your strengths and using them.
We call on Mammon to encourage our greed. Greed is about making sure your people are provided for.
We call on Beelzebub to indulge in envy. Envy is about knowing when you deserve more and using what you see around you fuel your drive to improve your own world.
We call on Sathanas to embrace our wrath. Wrath is about not letting anyone mistreat you or your people, and standing up to injustice.
We call on Abbadon to help us indulge in sloth. Sloth is about the importance of rest — both letting your body recover and heal, and not rushing into things too quickly.
And finally, the week culminating in the Equinox celebrations, we call on Asmodeus to join us in lust. Lust is about the things you love and about finding pleasure in everything.
Those who seek to abolish sin do so in an attempt to control and subjugate other people. It is much harder to question ill intent and stand up against injustice when you live without having your basic needs fulfilled. We must lead by example. Indulge in your sins, my creatures, take care of yourselves so you may flourish.
Live sinfully and tell us all about it. Be creative and express your sin through art and writing. How might the ghouls observe festan? How do the papas encourage the siblings? Do what feels right, and let us do it together.
Let us now revisit the Sins. Maybe you are new to indulging in them. Maybe you want to remind yourself of what they mean to us. Maybe you just like to read, and your piety is blossoming inside you right now. No matter the reason, let us indulge.
Gluttony
Our bodies need sustenance, our minds enrichment. Mother Earth is rich and caring, She has enough food for everyone. But sometimes illness or circumstance makes it hard to embrace gluttony. Sometimes resources are withheld by those who think too highly of themselves and refuse to accept that we are all part of a community. Do not let them convince you to give up your strength by weakening yourself. Embrace Belphegor in your heart, eat and feed each other so that we may all be gluttonous.
Pride
Pride is about acknowledging your strengths, where your power lies and what you can do in the world. Pride means taking that knowledge and saying "This is what I am for, what I should be doing, this is the power I can put back into the world for my people. No-one is better placed for this task than me and it is my duty to use that expertise for everyone else's benefit." In Pride, we find our connection to the Prince, find out the gift He gave us and it sacred. Finding the tiny shard of Him that lives inside each of us, as precious and holy as He is Himself.
Greed
Greed is to collect what is needed, to provide for those you love, and to destroy insufficiency wherever it arises. Oh, people struggle with greed. “How is greed good? Isn’t that how billionaires happen? How can I learn to justify that?”
But what this struggle arises from is this idea that, in order for me to have something, I have to take it from you. And that’s why people have a hard time with it - they stay stuck in that mindset of me against you, us against them, everything a competition all the time and the only prize is survival.
Yes, in order for me to have something, like a coin, that means that no-one else can have that particular coin. But just because I have food, that doesn’t mean no-one else can eat. Just because I have shelter, doesn’t mean I lock everyone else out in the rain and wind. What you gain through greed is gained to share. You build your stockpile so it can be used. Greed is not hoarding so you can admire the size of your collection, greed is gathering everything you can so that your people are provided for. There is a reason why we call Lord Mammon “The Abundant One” you know.
Greed is the only sin that plans ahead, you know? Lust is passion in the moment, gluttony will always return in a few hours, even sloth is only to satisfy that need for rest in the moment. Yes, they all set you up for the future, you’ll be fed and rested, but greed is the only one that gives you something to hold onto when you get there. Greed is the sin you can rely on tomorrow, next week, next month.
[from Copia's Midnight Mass on Greed]
Envy
Envy is an important sin that tends to hit a very tender spot - acknowledging that you deserve more. Allowing yourself to want it and seek it. That we are allowed to want more than the crumbs er have been allowed to scrabble together in a world that was not made to welcome us. Envy stands at the feet of unchecked power and knows that what they have should belong to us too.
Wrath
Wrath is about not letting anyone mistreat you or your people, and standing up to injustice. Saint Aya (or Eve, to some of us) is known as The First Daughter of Rage, and when we acknowledge what is unjust, what hurts us and angers us, we follow the footprints she left behind for us. Wrath is the fire within each of us that pushes us forward to tear down what holds us back.
To us, she’s the patron saint of unjust punishment […] Those who’ve been lied to and hurt by the ones who were supposed to protect them. You call on her when you know something is wrong, but you don’t have the courage to stand against it. And she’ll lend you her strength to help you fight.
[from Part 6 of Into The Eyes of Fire]
Lust
Although "lust" is what we tend to call the gift of Asmodeus, its proper name should be passion. The Lord of Passions calls on us to fill our minds and bodies with everything that feels good and feed our souls with happiness, to immerse ourselves in the things that make us happy. The people we love, the things we love doing, the causes we believe in - even the food we eat nourishes us more when it pleases us.
But, of course, lust is a huge part of that gift. Pleasure for the body is good for the mind and, for so many of us, lust is one of the greatest sources of pleasure. And we should be able to celebrate that. And for so many of us who grew up under a burning and endless gaze of disapproval, lust has been treated with such virulent hatred that even allowing ourselves to feel it is an act of rebellion. To you, our beloved siblings, we extend our most profound invitation to our season of indulgence. You are welcome, you are beloved, and your desire is one of the greatest gifts you have been given. And when you share it with us, you honor us more deeply than we can say.
I work with definitions a lot because they’re very telling. It seems part and parcel of Western struggles with the concept of wilderness that all our words for gardening spaces are words that mean “enclosed space”: garden, horticulture, park, orchard, yard
Many vegetables, most noticeably sweet corn and sugarsnap peas, are full of sugars that start turning to starch as soon as they're picked, so you will get the best and most flavorful experience if you eat them as close to harvest as possible.
Winter squash is full of starch that slowly turns to sugars once it gets picked, so you will get the best and most flavorful experience if you wait six weeks to three months (depending on the variety) after harvest before eating them.
Cold-hardy roots and brassicas are full of starch that turns to sugars after exposure to frost, so you will get the best and most flavorful eating experience if you wait to pick them until they've gone through multiple freezes.
1. A quartz stone near the oven makes your food taste better.
2. Growing basil in your kitchen wards away negativity.
3. Candles have longer lives when they’re kept in the freezer.
4. Get a lunar calendar to stay up-to-date with moon cycles.
5. A full moon increases extrasensory perception and so is the perfect time for psychic spells, rituals or potions.
6. Aphrodisiacs should always be prepared during the waxing moon.
7. The best time to plant herbs is when the moon is in Cancer, Libra, Scorpio or Pisces.
8. Have an aloe vera plant in your kitchen, as the juice is an instant cure for minor burns and the plant itself brings good luck.
9. Trust your instincts.
10. Always make your intent clear during a spell.
11. Sage can smell like weed sometimes, be careful of that.
12. Peach and avocado pits ward off negativity.
13. Write wishes on bay leaves and then burn the leaves to make sure they come true.
14. Place rosehips in your wallet to attract prosperity.
15. Use honey to sweeten the outcomes of your spells.
16. Stir your food clockwise to banish negative spirits.
17. Store your crystals in bowls of salt, so they’re cleansed when you need them.
18. When cleaning, sprinkle salt on the floor and go do something else. Come back to the salt after a while and sweep, so that all the negative energy is gone.
19. Self-care is witchcraft. Baths are literal and metaphorical cleansing rituals. Drawing are like complex sigils to clear your mind and calm you down.
20. Put dried rosemary in your home to purify and cleanse the space.
Mold and other fungi. Ungrounded electricity. Food poisoning. Night terrors. Sleep paralysis. Sleep deprivation. The fact that when we don't see a human face, muscles related to hearing tighten to be able to hear farther for threats. Minerals leaking into pipes.
Carbon monoxide poisoning is usually my go-to when people come to me asking for advice about a haunted house/being cursed, usually followed up by most of the above.
Like sorry if you thought my witch ass was just going to tell you to place a salt ring and burn some incense or w/e, but if you come to me telling me you’re seeing shit/got ill/your partner started acting weird when you moved into your new house, my witch ass is still going to tell you to check you’re not being poisoned by your surroundings before I jump to “you got ghosts in your veins.”
I see this, and agree, but it does not explain the poltergeist shit that sometimes happens around town. For a door to close itself, temperature difference. For a door to OPEN itself when it’s latched?? Ghosts.
So I wanted to know what kind of crystal could go in a wizard staff, right? so I googled “big crystal,” as one does, and got an Etsy ad for This
And as you all know I Am currently taking a geology class, so I am probably more emotionally invested in minerals than usual. But that is...very obviously not a natural crystal.
So I did some looking around on Etsy.
Now, these shops all seem to advertise to the “witchy”/“spiritual healing” type of person. And there are a lot of them. Crystals are a Big Thing on Etsy. And ALMOST ALL of them are obviously artificially cut into the same sort of prism with a triangular pyramid top, regardless of the actual sort of crystal it is supposed to be.
Even like, fucking, obsidian. Obsidian is volcanic glass, it doesn’t form crystals at all, it is not a crystal
I’m not throwing any shade at people who are into crystals for like witchy reasons, but it really seems like if crystals are spiritually important to you, you should know what a crystal is...right...?
So there I am. Caught in the helpless anger and distaste of looking at geologically inaccurate Etsy crystals.
And as I scroll, I start to see items in...interesting shapes:
“Oh,” I think to myself. “Oh no.”
But it is too late. I have heard the siren’s song, singing to me of knowledge that will destroy me, but that I cannot help but seek.
These...elongated objects are almost always ambiguously described as “massage wands,” “crystal healing wands,” and other such innocuous things. The egg-shaped objects are, um, “yoni eggs.”
...Right. Okay.
Maintain the youthfulness of my sacred organ.
IT’S A SEX TOY. SAY IT. BITCH, IT’S A SEX TOY, IT’S OKAY, SERIOUSLY, THERE’S NO SHAME IN IT, SAY IT WITH PRIDE, SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST,
OKAY.
Okay. I’m good. I’m fine.
Actually, you know what, never mind. There is shame in this and I want it to be never acknowledged again.
Additionally, I am not fine.
Why the fuck are there so many of these—
At this point I stop and start googling.
Now, Selenite is the crystalline form of gypsum. It is also known as satin spar. Selenite is brittle and breaks easily, and has a Mohs hardness scale of 2.
For those unfamiliar with the Mohs hardness scale, a mineral with a hardness of 2 is soft enough that it can be easily scratched with a fingernail. It also is dissolved by moisture.
NO. DON’T PUT THAT IN YOUR BODY???? DON’T PUT THE GYPSUM, WHICH HAS A MOHS HARDNESS SCALE OF 2, IS BRITTLE AND BREAKS EASILY, AND IS WATER SOLUBLE, INSIDE YOUR LITERAL ACTUAL VAGINA??????????
I try to reassure myself with the fact that these things are probably not actually selenite, because making a dildo out of such a soft mineral in the first place would be very difficult. Having seen fluorite before, I feel pretty certain that the fluorite yoni eggs are probably actually just glass.
I google fluorite.
Okay.
Further exploring online shows me that fluorite is soluble in various strong acids.
Some guys on a forum in 2004 have strong contradictory opinions on this.
(I google the pH of the vagina.)
I don’t understand how pH works. I give up on the solubility question and google the toxicity of fluorite:
I now know at least one orifice fluorite does not go inside.
I have opened Pandora’s box, except Pandora’s box is filled with minerals God did not intend to be anywhere near the vagina carved into the shape of dildos. Etsy is advertising me sex toys I wish I could forget.
And vaginal steam herbs.
It seems that there is potentially a correlation between wanting to steam your vagina and wanting to put rocks in it. I know, groundbreaking discovery.
Okay, so we’re talking therapy substitute therapy substitute.
(I begin to think about how desperately we need universal health care. Maybe I just need someone, something, to blame.)
At this point, I realize that I haven’t done any googling on whether dildos made of rocks are a good idea at all. So, very tentatively, as if typing it more slowly will make it any less observed by the FBI, I google whether quartz should be used...internally.
First result that pops up:
That’s, uh. That’s reassuring.
I decide I’m incapable of unpacking this particular suitcase.
There are, of course, a small handful of articles debating the safety of rose quartz sex toys. But I’m getting the feeling that this is not a normal question to have in the first place. I close the tab with little relief.
Etsy is still enthusiastically recommending me things that hurt me psychologically.
...pleasure chalk?
How can I describe the fear that this image struck in me, reader?
Pleasure Chalk? What could that be?
Is knowing worse, or is not knowing? I scarcely have a choice:
I check in with my emotions.
Is this relief? Am I relieved that they are eating the dirt instead of fucking it? One review complains about the taste. I don’t know what they expected.
I try in vain to struggle against the tide, to return to the relatively normal side of Etsy. I begin to resent, no, hate, these deceptively aesthetically pleasing hippie shops eagerly spreading medical misinformation and things as yet unknown.
This, unlike the other “crystals” I have shown, appears to show naturally grown crystals. They are, of course, quartz crystals, and $45 comes off as extremely overpriced. I have a quartz crystal I got for a dollar at an Eastern Kentucky rock festival, about the size and quality of the ones in the photo.
Quartz is the most common mineral in the Earth’s crust. But at least this is regular levels of annoying.
Then I see this:
Well, I see the photo and the price, and I think, that looks like a regular quartz crystal. There’s no way a regular quartz crystal is $1,347.
I read the description:
I am crying. I don’t want to google any of this. I am beyond googling. I no longer desire knowledge.
THATS A QUARTZ CRYSTAL. MOTHERFUCKER THAT’S QUARTZ. SIO2, MOST COMMON MINERAL IN THE EARTH’S CRUST. ITS FUCKING QUARTZ IM—
I click on a malachite.
The malachite promises to protect me from emails. And at this, darkest hour, I want to be protected.
I have been broken. I have been lured to my demise.
in regards to the edible clay, iirc I think that'w actually a thing? saw a video about it at some point but it was long enough ago that I can't remember very well. something about the mineral content or something being used in some places to act as a supplement, obviously etsy is kinda sus for sourcing it but the concept i'm pretty sure is like a thing that some cultures do
It is a thing. There’s an article briefly summarizing the reasons people eat dirt here; I also think I remember reading, at some point, that about a quarter of adults have reported doing so at some point or other.
The basic concept makes sense, I guess. Dirt has minerals in it, and when you have a dangerous deficiency and can’t get supplements in little pills, you’ve gotta do something, and sometimes the “something” your body comes up with is “crave dirt.”
The big problem with buying “edible clay” on Etsy is that this stuff is totally unregulated. (Most ‘alternative medicine’ is.) At the very least, you may or may not adequately address the dangerous nutritional deficiency you could likely have by eating random clay from Etsy. In a world where we do have supplements in little pills, there is no reason to just eat clay and hope it works. There’s no way of verifying what mineral content the clay has.
There’s also the fact that you could poison yourself with contaminants, since, again, this stuff is unregulated. I googled byproducts of kaolinite mining and quickly found results suggesting that it can absorb hazardous metals during the mining process and also that kaolinite deposits in Nigeria are also rich in radioactive thorium. In general, though, mining stuff out of the ground results in a lot of hazardous waste material.
Of course, the kaolinite pictured in the screenshot may indeed not be industrially mined kaolinite and may in fact instead be dried-up clay purchased at Hobby Lobby.
a little-known birth control method is tracking down and starting a fight with that twitter user who casts the “may your womb be barren” spells on everyone she dislikes
if u register satanic imagery as any kind of genuine threat... sucks to be you.... devils and flaming skulls are so cool and pretty to look at. youre missing out on all these epic devils and flaming skulls dude
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