#magic ritual

[bobbole]

Izabela Ewa Oldak, Trinity of the Moon

[bricktoygrapher]

It was Tasha all along! 🧙

I took this photo for the close-up challenge.

Tasha is such a fun character. She's one of the minifigures from the Dungeons and Dragons CMF series.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the DnD minifigures in time while they were still available, so I had to acquire some of them later. Fortunately, they can be found on the FireStar Toys online shop.

Her hut is actually the bottom floor of the LEGO Medieval Blacksmith set.

[obsidian-sphere]

Boys of New York #944 Sep 16, 1893. published by Frank Tousey

The White Wizard of the Bowery; or, The Boy Slaves of New York: A Story of the Mysteries of Mesmerism by Alexander Armstrong

[midnottart]

Loki • Samhain, 2023

[ravenousnightwind]

What people fail to do is realise the magic in the mundane. They fail to realise that the gods are working everyday all around us. They fail to see the benefit in the ritual of looking outside and being in that moment.

What we have is a tightly packaged sense of what magic is. That in order to cast you must do said thing, say said thing, call the quarters, have tools, and all that in your broomcloset stuff that many people have come to use and rely on for many years.

The failure in realizing what magic truly is, how it was potentially practiced in the past, is staggering. The world is a different place than it was, and our perceptions of what magic is has changed. People don't always call on gods and petition them. Instead they do it themselves, trying to bend the forces of the gods to their will. Without realizing these energies floating about are part of the divine. Not a mindless force to be controlled.

As an animist I see the gods in everything. From the way the wind blows, to how the trees grow, and my way of magic is relying upon the gods to show me the way. Magic is mundane in the sense that it exists everywhere and within everything. Yet, it also means establishing a relationship with gods so that you may petition them. Though this does not mean you'll get what you want, merely only that in order to cast, you must first possess the gall to ask.

At least from my experience, that is how magic works, through the connections of various spirits and gods and calling upon them for assistance in our affairs. Either by offering something or giving praise to them. For me, this is an essential reality, diving deeply into the divine.

Not everyone will see or even agree on that point though, and I respect that. I'm only just stating my experience.

[hahahahahaabsolutelynot]

To

The Witches of Tumblr

Hi, I'm a 15 year old girl living in India, am non-religious and want to see if I am capable of being a witch

I know next to nothing about rituals or types of witches, so if someone would explain them to me, I'd really appreciate that

I would like to perform small rituals that my family would not notice

So, any advice?

[areadersquotelibrary]

"In the words of Sam Webster, an accomplished ceremonial magician and a former webmaster at Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, ritual is “the principal technology for programming the human organism.” According to Webster, Pagan ritual serves as a kind of virtual theater that cultivates, or “programs,” intentions and spiritual experiences in participants. With its dramatic language of gesture, symbol, word, and scent, ritual bypasses the intellect and stimulates psychological and perceptual aspects of the self that register on a more subliminal level; by cutting a pentagram into the air or dancing a wild spiral dance, the self submits to the designs of human and cosmic powers on a more visceral plane than philosophical conceptions or sermons allow. Orthodox and Catholic Christians also recognize the extraordinary power of ritual, but they would describe the force of liturgy as arising from the spiritual authority of tradition. By rejecting such institutional claims, Pagans instead bring the question around to intent: what do we want to achieve with this ritual program? What powers—natural, emotional, social—do we want the self to engage? As Webster noted in an email interview, the metaphor of technology allows one to think about the transformative potential of ritual without lapsing into “fuzzyminded” mysticism. “By seeing what we are doing as tech, we can avoid seeing [it] as a sacred cow, and instead criticize it with accuracy and without attachment: is it doing what we intend? If so, can we improve on it? If not, how not: change or trash.”21 Though at first it may seem as if the notion of “ritual technology” would sap rites of their psychospiritual efficacy, Paganism’s creative and experimental approach to the sacred seems to actually profit from its self-conscious instrumentality. Of course, such technological thinking also brings along the familiar sorts of problems discussed earlier; Webster notes that many magic users get caught up with “the tech” for its own sake and pay much less attention to refining their spiritual goals."

- Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis