A Spiritual Guide To A Secular Future

[urbantrashmagic]

[urbantrashmagic]

New candle, it’s called “Knowing What to Burn”

It’s essentially a divination candle for when you want to make changes in your life and you need to know what to give up or get rid of in order to give yourself leverage to change.

The fire of your sacrifices will power your new intent, but that’s the next candle...

[urbantrashmagic]

Bast is the modern pagan pop-goddess who seems most prone to cutesy interpretations.

I have mixed feelings about this but her history does bear some interesting precedents.

As I understand it, Bast originated as a lion headed war goddess of Lower Egypt, the parallel to the lion headed goddess Sekhmet of Upper Egypt. When the two halves of Egypt went to war, Upper Egypt won and so Sekhmet remained a fierce lion while Bast was morphed into a domestic cat and a donestic goddess. The name Bast already carries a feminine ending but the later version, Bastet, may have been transformed to add a double, diminutive feminine ending, further altering her image.

It seems then that this tame, cute and approchable reinterpretation of Bast is a major part of her history and perhaps what makes her so appealing to modern women looking for a way to understand their own revision into cute and tame versions of themselves.

(Of course, the rise Japan’s kwaii-kitch aesthetic and the early internet’s cat obsession probably had something to do with this)

[urbantrashmagic]

Aaaand this is why you draw the eye of providence on candles

[urbantrashmagic]

I adapted traditional red envelopes into “wish envelopes” for the lunar new year.

Ritualized intention setting is a huge part of all new year traditions...and I desperately needed an excuse to buy these envelopes despite being too unmarried to hand them out. (Visual piggy bank puns are the best part of the year of the pig!)

Each envelope contains a written wish and $1 as an “activator” and a nod to the real tradition of these envelopes.

Updates when I get my real lai see money!

[urbantrashmagic]

The hardest part about urban trash magic

is what to do with your magical urban trash.

[urbantrashmagic]

I got a cross in my love working but I don’t know if it’s me crossing myself up or somebody else doing it to me.

(I don’t do love magic on specific relationships or people so this one is all me. As hopelessly cliche as it is, I firmly believe any relationship can be better solved with a working on loving your own self than on fixing other people.)

[urbantrashmagic]

People who are born to power never question whether or not they should use it.

The generation of Silicon Valley tech nerds never questioned whether or not it was right to do what they did to the world.

They could do it so they did it. That was all.

So why is it that the first thing we learn as witches is how not to use our power?

Are we the enlightened, responsible ones or are we just perpetuating our own disempowerment?

(Are we the future Vulvalini self-righteous in the knowledge that *they* killed the world or are we still just hiding from the monster in the closet that someone swore would come to get us if ever we forgot the rules?)

[urbantrashmagic]

I think if your magic doesn’t occasionally scare the hell out of you,

you’re doing it wrong.

[urbantrashmagic]

Antidepression Ritual (in 6 Steps)

1. Ask your body if it needs something (food, water, rest, a restroom…)

2. Apologize to your body if you’ve been ignoring its needs

3. Provide your body with food, water, rest or love as needed

4. Ask your emotional core if it needs something

5. Apologize to your emotional core if you’ve been ignoring its needs

6. Give your emotional core the love, attention or acknowledgement that it needs

[urbantrashmagic]

When I sat down to write this I really wanted it to be a *ritual* full of candles and flowers and extra steps and things to recite but then I realized all of *those* things were just a way to escape doing *these* things, the dirty work of self care.

[urbantrashmagic]

I bought a reversing candle then realized that it was made by *ahem* “opportunists” who thought it’d be great to start manufacturing folk magic candles without doing their research. The result is a reversing candle that you can’t reverse... ()

So, I scraped off most of the screen printing, reformed my intention & drew this beauty with decocolors: pioneering that urban trash magic style with a hodgepodge of miscellaneous symbolism and pseudo-meaningful geometry. Do all those triangles mean something? Nobody knows, but damn are they stylish!

[urbantrashmagic]

Antidepression Ritual (in 6 Steps)

1. Ask your body if it needs something (food, water, rest, a restroom...)

2. Apologize to your body if you’ve been ignoring its needs

3. Provide your body with food, water, rest or love as needed

4. Ask your emotional core if it needs something

5. Apologize to your emotional core if you’ve been ignoring its needs

6. Give your emotional core the love, attention or acknowledgement that it needs