#spooky tips

[taltos-seidmadr]

If there are any Hungarian speakers visiting this blog who are interested in spooky things: this is a treasure trove of traditional magic incantations.

[xxlovencarexx]

Spooky activities

— Before I get into today’s post, I would just like to apologize for being inactive recently! My life lately has been absolutely crazy but I’m happy to say that I can finally post ! I hope y’all like today’s post lovelies!

🍂 : Stock up on horror films and binge watch all of them! Here are some great films to watch for Halloween!

• Halloween(Michael Myers series)

• The Shining

• Us

• HalloweenTown

• It

• The Quiet Place

• The Conjuring

• Annabelle

And so many more! Fall is the perfect season to watch horror films and cuddle up underneath some warm blankets and eat snacks!

🍂 : Carve a pumpkin 🎃. I’ve always enjoyed doing this because you can do whatever you want with one! Paint it, carve it or even toast the seeds!

🍂 : Attend a pumpkin patch! Personally I’ve never been to one, but always wanted to, and I think they’d be very fun! Plus some even have hayrides which are pretty nice too. It’s a good way to spend fall.

🍂 : Buy some festive candles. If you’re a candle person like me, Candles are seen all over the house! Fall candles are definitely my absolute favorite ones and they smell so good and make me feel so cozy in my bed! I love the feeling it sends off, which is warmth.

🍂 : Spend sometime creating a Halloween playlist! Whether you’re going to host a party or just for yourself and get in the mood for the holiday! For starters, these are some good Halloween songs to help you get in the mood

• Thriller by Michael Jackson

• Somebody’s Watching Me by Rockwell

• People are Strange by The Doors

• Sweet Dreams by Marilyn Manson

• A Little Wicked by Valerie Broussard

Those are just a few but there are so much more out there you may find on Spotify.

🍂 : Pass out candy! If you aren’t the type to go out, You can stock up on some candy and give it out to kids! And if you stock up, you may even after extra to secretly munch on! 👀

🍂 : Bake some sweet treats! Perhaps some Halloween cookies to eat and or give out or bake some pumpkin pie (because pie is amazing) 🥧

🍂 : Go all out with Halloween decorations. My favorite decoration is probably the Halloween lights, They’re very pretty! Maybe some scary ones too if you want 🖤

🍂 : Practice some spooky makeup! I’ve done this a couple times mostly just to perfect my makeup for my costume, but it’s really fun too!

🍂 : Host a campfire and tell spooky stories with the group! Have some s’mores, friends or family, and have some scary stories on deck can be great for a creepy night!

🍂 : Attend a haunted house if you’re brave enough! (Don’t forget to be safe)

🍂 : Go to an actually haunted building. That is, if it is open to the public. Don’t trespass into a building as for you can get into a lot of trouble. However, If it’s okay, Then go ghost hunting all you want whether with a close one or by yourself!

I hope y’all have been having a great October so far and remember to stay safe for Halloween! Stay strong and always take care of yourselves 🖤🍂 With much love!! (I’ve missed you guys)

[taltos-seidmadr]

On spirit communication

(art by galactic-castle)

Before I really start making my point, please allow me to make a short prologue about where I’m coming from and why I’m writing this post.

I’m a Heathen, in terms of religion, and in my practice I do some things that can be construed as “spirit work” according to the understanding of the greater community, but I don’t really consider myself to be a part of that community, and I’m pretty much off doing my own thing that is closer to my understanding of my own culture and/or Heathen traditions rather than what I see circulating on the internet most often. There are two reasons why I wanted to bring this up. One, I don’t feel myself qualified to give advice on anything and this might end up the only advice post I ever write, especially regarding this topic. And two, I apologize for occasionally using some terms that might be more specific to me than the actual jargon of the wider spiritworking community, because I’m not in it, but I hope it will be understandable regardless.

One of my spirit worker friends approached me with an issue they were having. It made me realize what a huge underlying issue it is, and it is indeed one that I also used to have, so I told my friend what I did to resolve it - and after their encouragement to do so, I’m telling you all now hoping that it may help some. I think to some degree it can apply both to the spiritworking community and to those pagans who keep in contact with their deities in some sort of way that involves trance work and/or resembles verbal communication. I obviously have no idea whether it’s applicable to every practice or not, so take it with a pinch of salt, but Hungarians have a pretty insightful and witty folk tale about the importance of a pinch of salt in the right place and the right time, so pretend that I made a reference to that and hear me out.

I want you to imagine the following situation:

You are a beginner practicioner of whatever you are doing. You start talking to some spirits, establish relationships with them, and maybe even start making friends. (While I do believe that a god is a type of spirit, right now I’m just including deities in the category of “spirits“ for the sake of convenience, and just know that the overall advice is still applicable if you don’t believe the same.) But real life also demands your time and energy, and so do real life people, so you begin to pay just a little bit less attention to your spirit fam than you would like. And then you maybe spend a little too much time on the hellsite dot com, and you read a post about how if you don’t actually pay enough attention to your spirit fam, then you are one of Those™ spiritworkers, which is Bad. And you barely even notice it, but somewhere in the back of your mind you start feeling guilty. Then the little behavioral psychology mouse that lives in your brain learns that talking to spirit family=electric shock, and thus you start avoiding your spirit fam even more, and you feel even more guilty, and so the cycle keeps continuing with increasing returns (on the guilt, or diminishing ones on the communication end).

My friend was there. I’ve been there. A lot of us have been there, probably. Maybe you didn’t even have to imagine this scenario because this is exactly where you are at.

And this entire guilt-avoidance cycle (just according to my unofficial armchair observation) goes back to an idea that nobody really says out loud but everyone seems to imply, which says the following:

“You should spend exactly as much time and energy on  spirit relationships as you would on human relationships”

and I’m not even going to argue outright with this statement, because in some ways I kinda agree, but this post is already taking me 84 years to write so just allow me to cut to the chase and lampshade something that I don’t agree with.

This statement seems really wise and unassuming... until I remember that in order to spend time and make meaningful interaction with a spirit on that side, I need to tune in.

This is the point where I feel a bit on shaky grounds because I don’t have much to go off of other than my own practice, but maybe some of this will sound familiar. Take this from someone who has just never been completely tuned out probably since birth, that in order to tune in in a truly meaningful way, I still have to expend a LOT of energy, and I’m not even talking about anything magical here, I mean the completely everyday mental energy that I have a limited amount of at any given point. What this means in effect is that if I wanted to treat my spirit relationships exactly the same way as I do my human relationships, I would have to spend about half my life in a highly concentrated trance state, which is

a) probably impossible, b) even if it were possible, it would probaby serve as a serious detriment to my ability to navigate the real world, not to mention the active harm it would do to my physical and mental health on the long run.

You need to keep in mind that regardless for your metaphysical beliefs, you are a physical being and you have an extremely important responsibility to take care of your physical manifestation. And keeping this in mind, instead of allowing myself to run the guilt-avoidance cycle like a hamster runs a wheel, I could do two things that lead to healthier results:

1. Make a healthy, honest and realistic assessment of what you can actually manage

For me it’s kind of a go to, that no matter how little time or energy I had during the day, and no matter how stressed/anxious/whatever I feel at the end of the day, I pretty much always can do at least a little bit of trance before I fall asleep, when I can have a little contact with the spirit family, and it actually helps me fall asleep too, so it’s kind of a win-win-win. I’m bringing this up because I don’t have the scientific receipts on the matter but I’ve heard that something about the state of the mind when it’s getting into and out of sleep is special and that makes trancing easier. Don’t quote me on it, but I’ve experienced that to be true.

2. Involve your spirit family in ways of communication that either don’t involve trance at all, or don’t require tuning in fully

As for the first half, the most straightforward example that comes to mind is divination, or literally any sort of randomized thing that you could use to communicate. The second half is a little bit harder to explain but I will try to give my own personal example.

I want you to imagine a spirit phone. This is metaphorical right now but visually speaking, I really want you to imagine an actual phone, the object. For fun. It has a screen you can read texts on. You don’t even have to imagine it very hard or in great detail, you exactly know what a phone looks like. There are many days when I cannot hold an entire environment in my mind’s eye in great detail, but there is no time when I wouldn’t be able to put so much energy in that I wouldn’t know what is written on an imaginary screen as text. Of course communication like this is a bit limited, but this way you can text your spirit fam any time you want. If you are saying rn, but Sithi, that is the stupidest fucking idea I ever heard, texting my gods?! This is too modern for me! then you need to understand that the point is not whether this is an actual phone you are holding, but the limitation through which you channel the finite amount of mental energy that you have. The point is the focus. That you are only imagining so much that actually carries information value. If you want, imagine a word wall from Skyrim, a magical book, a burning forest floor on which you scrape your message into the smoldering ashes with a holy stick, I don’t know man. Use your imagination. Come up with something that fits into your inner world and makes you happy. Similarly if visualization is not your strongest suit, just work out something that builds on your strengths instead. (Funny thing about the phone is that it’s very good for making voice calls too! Hmm? Hmmmmm? Wink wonk!)

Just keep in mind that just because you cannot do everything that you planned or can even think about, it doesn’t make you somehow inferior or less than a human. It can be good to stretch your limits, to an extent, but knowing where those limits are in the first place is probably THE most important thing you can do for yourself in your spiritual practice (or in anything for that matter) and it’s a piece of knowledge that will make your relationships healthier and easier, no matter what layer of reality you are on. That was pretty much my hot take and I hope this will help you let go of some unrealistically high standards and be a little bit easier on yourselves, because we all need that a lot. Especially right now. 🔥👁️‍🗨️✨

[taltos-seidmadr]

I had exactly One(1) meme’s worth of mental energy and productivity in me today so I had to make it count

[taltos-seidmadr]

fylgja anon again I'm sorry hhhh but thank you! You know, I'm in a support group of highly sensitive people because I'm very sensitive to emotions and sometimes feel what the other is feeling. So basically, I should know right? But something always tells me I can't trust my feeling and I don't know why. This spirit really has never asked for anything, so I guess I'm fine. My gut feeling is usually right but there's always this 'what if I'm still wrong?' So thank you for the your kind answer

Of course anon, I’ll try to help as I can.

Honestly, I think you are asking some really interesting questions here to which there is no real clear-cut answer. Yes, I do think that a sense of empathy is an extremely powerful skill to have when you communicate with the other side, and a strong intuition will be like a compass to you. But a compass is a very limited tool that can also be swayed.

Intuition is always to some degree clouded by preconceptions, anxieties, personal biases, etc. Moreover, feelings and intentions can even be concealed magically by spirits, some of which are very good at this because they do it for a living. Maintaining the idea that you could be wrong, about anything, at any moment, is not a bug - it’s a feature. A degree of skepticism is actually a really important part of your practice that should never completely go away.

That being said, if you feel like you can literally never ever trust your intuition, that’s... probably not good. It sounds like a kind of issue that might be worth bringing up to a therapist.

The tl;dr is that on the skepticism vs. intuition scale you have to treat everything on a case by case basis and there is no easy answer to it. To know how much and in what ways you can trust your own intuition, is to know yourself very, very well as a person, in and out. This is a thing that takes rigorous, honest observation, a lot of time, passive experience, and active work.

This also means that you will sooner or later arrive at a point where you have to be able to ultimately and deeply accept & forgive yourself for not doing everything perfectly. Which sounds like an empty platitude I know, even to me as I say it, but especially for certain types of people with certain upbringings, it becomes a steep and dangerous mountain once they actually try to cross.

[taltos-seidmadr]

Synchronicities can be delivered by little internet goblins quite a lot. However, for a truly discerning person, to decide whether That Thing You Saw On Social Media was truly a Sign™ or not, how algorithms actually work is a topic very well worth researching.

[taltos-seidmadr]

Trick or treat 🧡

This is the last one!!! I’m wrapping it up fellas!

You get a TREAT:

I sincerely hope you won’t need this, but someone who is reading this might. It’s a protection sigil to use during the holiday celebrations for family get-togethers, in case the family in question is Not The Best and the meeting is making you nervous. 

It is designed to both fortify you mentally and shield you from the worst of it from the other family members who hopefully will act amicable or at the very least tolerable. (That’s why it has two colors!)

I made this with the winter holidays in mind but technically it could work with any family get-together in case your family doesn’t celebrate anything during the wintertime but there is a meeting you are anxious of. 

Thanks to everyone who sent trick or treats! I wish the best for all of you for the winter holidays and tons upon tons of great presents (if applicable). Merry Yule! 🎄

[taltos-seidmadr]

Hello, I just wanted your opinion on something if that's okay. I'm a norse pagan Lokean, and Loki offered me a powerful banishing spell to make the negative people in my life stay away forever, he said he would ask 4 times to make sure that I want this for sure. I already said yes twice, I am emotionally abused and scared that I won't cope good without them in my life. What would you do if faced with the same choice?

Happy Yule (slightly belated?) dear Anon! Gosh I’m really sad to hear that you are going through some hardships... Just keep in mind that I’m not super qualified to give advice on your situation, so still weigh this over for yourself, but here’s my friendly two cents. 

This may not be applicable to you as you say you are a Lokean and you’ve probably been around the block for some time but I wanted to make absolutely sure. Just in case. Before going into anything like that, always, always make sure that it’s really Loki - spirits of the more nasty kind love to feed off of the confusion about his deal/what a trickster god really is. Some can pretend to be “Loki” very convincingly... depending on what your expectations are. Just be careful. 

That being said, I will answer presuming that you already made sure it’s him. 

Is he offering to teach you the banishing spell? If yes, I wouldn’t even hesitate to accept honestly, there’s always room for one more spell in the arsenal. But from the context I’m guessing that’s not the case...? So ask him then! I definitely would. There’s nothing wrong with a banishing spell, it’s basically a magical protection of your boundaries, you have the right to do that - but I personally don’t like casting spells that are irreversible. Set some kind of condition for it to dispel in case something backfires. Think and talk over the possible caveats thoroughly. You know, just like with any spell really. 

If the question is, “Should I trust Loki with this” honestly this is not a decision I can make for other people... do you? I probably would, depending on the context, but keep in mind that gods are also not perfect and may give bad advice sometimes. I wouldn’t advise going into it blindly.However, if the question is “Will I ever be able to cope without my abusers” Yes, you will. I understand that this seems like an incredibly difficult thing to even think about right now but you will. Here’s something really important though. Try to seek out help about this matter, both from trusted loved ones and and professionals. Getting in contact with a therapist or something of the like would be great. But there are also a lot of good books and resources out there. I’m not really qualified to give you advice here but I support you. 

Tl;dr. 1. Communication is key, as always. 2. Trust anything at your own discretion, even Loki3. DIY if possible4. You deserve good things and good people in your life! Just reach out. You don’t have to do this alone. 

That’s basically my thought, based on what I understand from your ask - but if you want to talk this over in more detail my dms are open!

Happy Holidays!