Hello folks, my name is Ash (they/them) and I practice primal movement meditation and ritual work as a container for my practice.
You might see me reference one of the four ancestral lineages I work with.
The Elder Kin
The Green Wild
The Ecstatic Ones
The Ice Forged
Each one moves different and has different lessons to teach. NOTE; This is strictly for my personal practice. You don't need specific bloodlines to work with primal spirituality. Your ancestors moved to drums around the fire too.
What you'll find here:
session reports and ritual techniques
music recommendations
ancestral lineage work and archetypal imagery
tarot spreads
What you wont find:
sanitized spirituality
homophobia, transphobia, racism, folkism, or bigotry. I am queer and my practice is too
gate-keeping
theism
Honestly, I plan on using this place a more of a journal/planner but we will see what it turns into.
Interested in learning more about my practice? Check out these links:
Philosophy of the Flame
Moving Meditations
Random links:
Unsplash - Free images, no AI
Frustrated Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers fled a Minnesota neighborhood after residents alerted each other by triggering car a
Basically, people are using their key fobs to set off their car alarms when they see ICE.
This is effective for several reasons:
Obviously, it alerts everyone that something is wrong. Given ICE has been terrorizing Minnesota, people are likely to immediately know it is ICE. This gives people time to flee or barricade themselves in their homes.
ICE loses the element of surprise.
If one person hears a car alarm go off, they can trigger their own alarm, alerting even more people, but also making it really annoying for ICE. Annoying sounds petty, but it can be effective. Have you ever been in a building when a super loud fire alarm went off? It's very hard to concentrate. You can't hear much else. You just want to leave. ICE experiences this when a whole street if car alarms go off. Which means they make mistakes.
The southern states in the US are expecting to get hit with severe winter weather this weekend (temperatures below freezing, ice, and snow). The type that we do not experience on the regular. Speaking as a southerner, many of us are not good at coping with this type of thing. I want to emphasize something: this is not our faults. The infrastructure in southern states were not built to be suitable for this type of weather. The supplies we have available to us to deal with snow and ice aren't nearly as vast as northern states because this type of weather is not normal for us.
That being said, it would be wise to prepare in every way possible while there is still time. Even if it doesn't turn out as bad as predicted, better to be safe than sorry. Here is a checklist of things to consider:
Stock Up On:
ā¢ Multiple Gallons of Water (water lines are very likely to freeze, even with faucets dripping)
ā¢ First Aid Supplies (You never know when it could be needed.)
ā¢ Long-Lasting Candles (in case the power goes out, but flashlights are preferred over candles)
ā¢ Matches (lighter fluid freezes in cold temperatures)
ā¢ Flashlights
ā¢ Batteries
ā¢ Paper Products (Toilet Paper, Paper Towels, Tissues, Paper Bowls + Plates, etc)
ā¢ Hats, Gloves, Socks (Your hands, feet, and ears will thank you later.)
ā¢ Blankets
ā¢ Battery Banks (for your phone, in case electricity goes out)
ā¢ For those who have a vehicle, make sure you fill it up on gas.
ā¢ GET ANY NECESSARY MEDICATIONS REFILLED IF POSSIBLE.
DO:
ā¢ Wear layers. I know this can be a sensory nightmare for some but if your electricity goes out, you will need to stay warm with what you have. If you have wool-based or waterproof fabrics, use it.
ā¢ Take advantage of outdoor fireplaces and grills for heat if needed. Many homes these days do not have wood stoves or fireplaces, so if you absolutely need a heat source take advantage of what is outdoors if necessary.
ā¢ Inform yourself of the symptoms of and basic treatments for hypothermia and frostbite.
ā¢ Pay attention to your health. Do not overexert yourself. Do not waste your energy on tasks that are not immediately important. Conserve your energy.
DO NOT:
ā¢ Do not leave any fires or other sources of heat unattended, and do not allow any flammable objects near sources of heat.
ā¢ Do not use a gas-fueled oven or stove for a source of heat. This can lead to carbon monoxide buildup in your space. That shit will kill you.
ā¢ Do not use your vehicle for heat when it is inside a garage or other closed-off space. Again, carbon monoxide. That shit will kill you. You will also want to save your gas as much as possible.
ā¢ Do not try to travel unless it is absolutely necessary, and if it is necessary to travel in a vehicle be careful. If you are considering staying with a friend or relative, or even seeking shelter at a place like a hotel, get there before the severe weather hits.
it is interesting to me how "seeing" and "hearing" god is very normal in christianity and several other monotheistic religions. but as soon as you're a pagan, it's delusions and psychosis.
Whatās interesting to me as someone who has been in online pagan spaces for a long time is that this kind of in fighting goes in cycles. 5-ish years ago it was perfectly normal for all styles of pagans to makes these sorts of claims. Now itās fallen largely out of vogue. In another 5-ish years it will probably be common again.
Tbf a good many Christians aren't saying it literally. They "see" God in beauty and action and they "hear" God in their heart and morals.
A lot of people on this webbed site will/used to say things like "Dionysus appeared as a full and complete apparition in front of me and told me out loud directly that I am chosen to work with him." Or talking directly about their God's likes and dislikes as if they're friends.
I think its also important to note the context that there are a lot of 13 year olds on here essentially cos playing with religion. (Which is fine! Im not mad at them thats a whole other bucket of worms that I dont want to get into!) But yeah teenagers will just say stuff about Paganism or Christianity or what ever flavor that they want to be cool and intense about.
I also think this webbed site uses language in a way that comes across as very literal when it might not be in practice. Like when I work with domovoy and refer to him as my little hairy man and reference his love for whisky and dislike for white wine over red it sounds very direct and literal, but I didnt come to that information by asking and receiving an outloud anwser from an apparition. Tumblr users have this way of anthropomorphizing when they speak that can come across as disingenuous.
This was long winded, but I think that the reason people here tend to be accused of faking or hallucinating has a lot to do with either the age of the poster or the tumblr accent that contributes to a casual and personified way of speaking.
That about lines up with my experiences, too. Christians generally "see" God in what they perceive as the manifestations of his grace and "hear" God in what some of us might call the wise mind.
And then in the pagan community, you'll come across any number of extremely young and unbalanced people claiming they had a very literal vision or very literally heard their deity telling them something that's very obviously not congruent with reality, which they are now trying to make your problem. Things like, "my goddess says that our ancestors all worshiped her this very specific way and they all believed these very specific things about her, and if you don't want to meet the Goddess's wrath you have to return to the old ways right now! If you disagree with me that means you're basically Christian."
Also like, godphoning isn't looked down upon because most pagans think you can't communicate with your deities; it's looked down upon because a lot of people were acting like their UPG gave them the right to tell other people what to believe and do.
Sometimes there are Christians who act like these kinds of people, but usually they aren't really welcome in normal Christian communities, either. Normal Christians would typically look at somebody acting like this and reckon they were mentally ill and/or needed deliverance.
This is definitely true. You might also see some Christians (mostly Baptists/Evangelicals) express a sense of inspiration/impulse which they understand as divine by saying something like āGod has laid it on my heart that I shouldā¦ā etc. That can stray a bit into this territory if someone is trying to use it to beef up their authority or influence someone elseālike saying āGod has laid it on my heart that Iām supposed to ask you outā to try to pressure a date into saying yes because itās āthe right thingā. I think this can be adjacent to āWell my goddess said Xā stuff.
I will say there are certain Christian sectsāas you said, theologically a bit marginal, but physically not smallāwho do believe in very direct inspiration or extremely literal āGod beamed this directly into my headā type of stuff and enact it in similar ways to the example Dionysus-vision. Itās mostly in Pentecostalism and charismatic nondenominational churches, and it sometimes getsā¦ very scammy and culty very quickly.
This isnāt to say all Pentecostals/charismatics are faking or scamming: the vast majority of congregants are not. But there have been a lotttt of instances of leadership of Pentecostal and charismatic revivals and megachurches getting caught using techniques like cold reading and prior research to claim God āprovided themā information about strangers in order to validate their visions as accurate, for example.
Itās these communities where youāre most likely to see someone who is genuinely experiencing a delusion get reinforced as 100% correct and just speaking to God really directlyāor, alternately, misunderstood to be demonic possession, which these groups are usually really into as well. That does happen, in the same way that people with scrupulosity OCD may get reinforced in that by Christian communities with a high emphasis on rule-following, guilt/shame, or a depressed personās fatalism might be approved of in Calvinistic church contexts. Does it mean charismatic churchesā memberships are only made up people with religious delusions? No way.
I would guess itās probably similar with pagansāthat the most extreme edges are likely to have some mix of groupthink/acted-out experiences for the sake of your peers; clout-chasing; grift; and actual mental illness. Itās a bit like the extremely literal belief in manifestation and the reasons people perform having experienced that.
I would highly recommend the Heaven Bent podcast for more information about this side of Christianity. It has seasons which focus on things like the Bethel Church in Redding, CA and International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri (abbreviated IHOP-KC, because yes, they did get copyright sued by the International House of Pancakes). She also spoke with the child of an actual false prophet who claimed to have super literal visions about what the heck was going on there/why he chose to do so.
For the cultier side, Letās Talk About Sects has a bunch of deep dives on this tooāthese movements are very big in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand so the podcaster whoās also an Aussie covers them pretty extensively.
Itās also notable that a lot of charismatics are into glossolalia (speaking in tongues) which is often perceived outside a church context as probably a mental illness thing since itās essentially someone suddenly talking in an apparently-nonsense language. The theological claim is itās a language given specifically to you and only you by God as a sign that youāre saved. A lot of ex-charismatics have also talked about having made theirs up as early adolescents because they felt highly pressured to do so by their community to demonstrate that they were saved. So thatās its own phenomenon which is in most cases not related to mental illness or delusions, but may also be, at least for some people, something other than a very literal manifestation of Godās voice. Iām not calling anyone a liar here*, but am basing this off of accounts from people who did experience it in these communities as emotionally significant but non-divine.
*aside from people who got caught in actual lies, like they faked a miraculous healing or functionally-psychic experience and said God did it, but something like the origins of a unique tongue isnāt something you can ādebunkā.
believe it or not, wikipedia can be an excellent place to learn about various topics in witchcraft (or anything really). you can find every festival, every religious practice, the history of any culture, and it lists the sources at the end of the article that you can check out. it's not the perfect place for learning but it's certainly a very good start and it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of learning all sorts of topics. it will teach you so, so much better than any AI. it's made by actual humans and not just spitting out personalized garbage.
talk to the wind and let it carry away your regrets.
forage for wildflowers to place on your altar, press in thrifted books, or give to loved ones ābe careful when identifying
watch sunrises and sunsets. wake up before the sun. bare witness to the painted sky.
spend hours in the woods among the wild. take long long walks or sit still and watch the world.
talk to plants and listen to them. make friends.
get field guides to trees, plants, birds, etc. that are native to your area. learn which are which. bookmark pages that you recognize or want to find.
sing back to the robins. caw back to the crows.
journal by firelight and feel the flame burn your worries away.
gather snow and bring a bowl inside. talk to it and tell it your worries. your fears. let it melt, transmuting your stress and worries into healing nourishment. bring it outside and water the soil. see how things can be changed.
dance. run. move your body to sweat, if this is something you can do
collect stones from the river and try to find the best ones. keep them in your pocket. hold onto them to remember that youāre an animal.
go to a lake and float. feel the water carry you. lifting you from your stress. bring a vial and collect some for spellwork.
make a necklace out of an acorn and thread.
stand in the rain. dance in it. lay down in the grass and let it pour. let it wash fears away, transform doubt to hope. start anew.
spirits don't have to be your friend. the rock in your backyard doesn't have to behave like a human or be useful to you to deserve respect. there is inherent value in loving the web of spirits that surrounds us without asking what they can do for us.
Last night, I set out the salt to charge for a motivation spell jar Iām doing on the new moon. If Iām planning to do moon work, I usually try to start it the quarter before.
Iāve recently been working with the Trickster archetype and found a little ruby in zoisite Vulpix that I knew I had to have for its anchor.
I was super excited to find it in the same stone that my Green Wild/Hunter archetype obelisk! It joined the altar last night after being cleansed in a chill little homecoming ritual.
Iām doing a deep dive into my Robin Wood tarot deck, starting at the Fool. Today was the Lovers and since the altar is active but not actively working, itās there where I can see it, along with its Wooden Tarot counterpart cause Iām trying to get more familiar with it in general. There is also my daily Woodland Wardens draw, today is the Crow and the Dogwood - Intelligence.
Iām not gonna start posting these everyday, sometimes tending it simply means lighting the candle or a stone added or removed. But I do want to start documenting when I bring something new in, like the Trickster anchor.
Everyone who plays around with Tarot cards long enough winds up with a ābadā card that they love. I just barely persuaded my husband not to get the Ten of Swords tattooed on his body; traditionally, it shows a corpse with ten swords stuck in their body and means āutter ruin,ā but he thought that if it took ten swords to kill you, then you must have put up a pretty good fight.
honestly this is the most badass ten of swords interpretation i've ever heard.Ā i'm stealing this
I actually have two altars, a working altar and a resting altar.
Iāve never really liked the idea of charging something and then putting it in a box until I need it. Part of that is the ADHD, I forget whatās there. But thereās also the fact that I tend and rearrange my altar almost daily and sometimes, Iām mid spell and realize that I have something that wants to join in.
Itās also where my tools rest when theyāre not in use and they donāt feel right on my working altar in that moment.
