#lees yaps

[caniddoe]

Stop thinking so hard about participating in culture and just go do it. If you exist in actual community with people, you will be corrected in mistakes and be able to have conversations about your viewpoints without being shunned.

Colonial culture teaches us that we may only be cared for or loved if we are perfect, and being perfect is never truly possible. Non-colonial culture teaches us that we may make mistakes or be uncertain or stupid, but we are also valuable enough to be taught better.

Our fixation on perfection leads us to fixate on being enough and interferes with our ability to be present. Get up and go talk to people in your community, you will learn more and feel safer than you ever will doom spiraling about ancestry DNA results and yearning for a romanticized version of “the homeland”

[caniddoe]

I need white Appalachians to very quickly change the way they discuss the connections between the Appalachian mountains and the mountains in Ireland and Scotland. Yes, I know they’re geologically connected and that’s SUPER cool, genuinely. However, I’m seeing way too many folks get very close to manifest destiny type rhetoric. Y’all realize indigenous tribes were here first, right?

[caniddoe]

In retrospect, the spike in people claiming to be psychic vampires or vampiric back in 2020-2021 is really fascinating to me. First off, because they seemed to have disappeared so quickly (at least from my timelines on social media) compared to some of the other fads, reactionary or otherwise, on spiritual communities on social media.

Presently, I can’t be assed to go dig through the bowels of witchtok and reddit to find specific examples but I do recall a few encounters with this brand of practitioner. Thematically, they were typically self-proclaimed death witches or baneful witches, and they often open with psychic vampirism/typical vampirism without taking anybody to dinner first. In video content detailing these experiences, the rhetoric was always the same ‘I am just such a powerful practitioner, I draw energy from other people to feed myself.’ I even remember some white boy in a durag on tiktok claiming he’d intentionally start internet drama so he could siphon off of it. It, largely, is/was another occultist form of sniffing one’s own asshole on the internet.

That said, I still find it fascinating.

I’ve been going back and forth on the presentations of dual-souled people in Slavic folklores and whether or not they are all inherently vampiric by nature of simply being two-souled and carrying the risk of becoming actual vampires later on. I still have yet to form an opinion on this, but what is interesting to me is that, at least in Slavic folktales, becoming a vampire is near-always framed as a tragedy for either the person becoming a vampire, or for their family/community who is going to be victimized by vampirism. The only exception to this would, in my opinion, be the sub-category of vampire myths seen in the west Carpathians (I’m unsure if other regions have these as well, if they do, please let me know!!) wherein the recently deceased becomes a vampire due to a deep-seated care for or worry about their community. Examples of this include stories about newlywed husbands getting up and returning to their widows at night to tend to their household duties as they normally would, farmers harvesting crops at night, mothers who died in childbirth returning to soothe their babies in the night. All of the stories in that specific category have vampirism stem from love. The other grouping of stories are your more typical “person who was buried wrong or killed wrongfully comes back to kill crops, spread disease, and eat livestock” stories.

I may just be viewing modern claims of psychic vampirism or classic vampirism through a Slavic folkloric lens and my own personal experiences with being dual-souled but the claim to all of the ‘power’ and the pride in destruction with none of the suffering or acknowledgement that these traits are often viewed as wrong by cultural groups, is just really interesting to me, as I don’t think it aligns with what we see in folkloric vampirism (whether we’re talking stereotypical blood suckers or just people who take more than they give).

[caniddoe]

I feel like the heavy community dismissal of the use of love magic or fortune telling for “silly” things is the magic community’s way of being in its “I hate pink” phase. In a bid for a non-standard belief and practice to be validated by outsiders, a lot of us are quick to dismiss types of magic that can be easily classified as frivolous. I understand why this knee-jerk reaction often happens, but I do think it’s absolutely worth admitting that there is plenty of evidence for divination and magic being used for entertainment without diminishing its power. A practice doesn’t need to be complex and somber all of the time, that’s poor incentive to engage in it sincerely. Go do something fun

[caniddoe]

Linguistic Imprecision and Colonialism in Cultural Reconnection Movements

In recent years, as fascism’s expansion into the periphery of white attetion has caused counter efforts focused on white people reconnecting with their ethnic culture to offset the encroachment of white supremacy. I do not condemn this effort, in fact, I view it as deeply important to decolonizing.

That said, I have two very big issues with how it’s conducted. The first is a fixation on historic ethnicity rather than immediate cultural group (I’ll talk about this in another post) and the second is a colonial attitude towards reconnection.

Though colonial de-colonizing efforts take many different forms, I’m going to focus on a specific manifestation of it that’s been on the brain today, thanks to a chat with friends, which is a resistance to developing a relationship with a culture’s language. See how I didn’t say *learn*. Yeah, I would be a hypocrite if I said that, I haven’t learned Lemko, not even close. I say develop a relationship because as you engage with a culture, you should learn their words for things. Yes, even if it’s just transliterated or you stammer or feel like a white college girl who came back from her semester abroad in France pronouncing it. Yes, even if you have to answer multiple asks about what it means and when it’s frustrating you can’t translate in your head. It’s due deference.

Even if learning a new language in its entirety is inaccessible or difficult for whatever reason, I can’t think of a reason to not call gods by the term the people that worshipped them used, or to use the right word for a head covering instead of just saying veiling. Non-specific language lends itself to appropriation. That’s why devotional jewelry often takes the shape of rosaries depspite not being for a Catholic practice, or veiling seems to always mimic the styles of hijabs instead of hair coverings that emulate those actually used by a cultural or historical group.

Now, I can already hear certain demographics running to the reblogs, comments, and my asks to screech about me using examples from two colonial religions for this discussion, but that, too, is intentional.

Colonialism encourages making certain things the default en masse, therefore making similar traits in different cultures easier to ‘other'. Pushing back against that defaulting with careful, precise language use benefits everyone. It fosters precision, it fosters thoughtfulness, and it fosters patience when you have to take a moment to explain something to somebody. To me, this thoughtfulness, if practiced regularly or, at the very least, earnestly, will naturally expand into other aspects of one’s cultural/religious reconnection efforts. Precise language lends itself to precise research, which lends itself to deeper understanding, and so on. What I listened to while rambling about this. Naturally I lost my train of thought when i swapped what I was listening to.

[caniddoe]

so i was imagining the steps of making a cloth holder for the bearot cards @vigilantlight got me for culturally nonspecific winter holiday (christmas) because the box they came in is already beat the fuck up bc I take my divination tools with me everywhere I go even if I don't use them much on the daily, as a video tutorial thing I'd film and in that imaginary video i was getting comments asking whether I cleanse my decks before using them if they go everywhere in that faux-maternalistic control technique witchy social media likes, and I was thinking about how I didn't value my tools being "spiritually clean" when they live in my backpack because they're tools. and then I was trying to think of why the obsession with spiritual cleansing in particular bothers me and its bc it is forcing a boundary between spirituality and thr world

[caniddoe]

Indigeneity and being white are not two mutually exclusive things, btw. One of them is an indisputable fact, the other one is a category that is based on how someone looks. Culturally disconnected white ‘allies’ will holler about blood quantum being bad until they’re purple in the face and then still attack and dismiss indigenous people based upon skin color

[caniddoe]

Finally got back to a place that I’ve been missing more than I’ve seen it in the last ten years.

People will always wax poetic about how the trees in Appalachia proper suffocate, that you can feel them bending around you, as if to trap you there, and, I’ll be honest, after so long away from the county where my family’s from, I was braced for that suffocation.

When I crossed the border from Virginia to West Virginia and those mountains and those trees began to bend in on each other, what I got instead was a warm quilt wrapped around shoulders that have been squared for too damn long.

I have spent far too much time in places where the trees are young and uncertain and the sky is too big, too watchful, with glass and concrete towers that shrink everything nearby by design, that the density of the greenery and the smell of a cattle farm stationed beside a river made me start crying with relief. Even as things have changed over the decades, the homestead that my family’s had for generations is reduced to a pale patch of gravel on Google Maps, and my great-great grandparents’ flat markers on the family plot were covered by grass, it was still such a relief to go back, even just for an hour. Part of my soul was able to sit down.