Secret of the Forest

Hi! You may call me Volt. I'm a devotee of Dionysos and Hermes. I am also a witch. This is where I put devotional art and share things that inspire me.

[winedarkgod]

[kebriones]

Hermes sketch

inspired by these depictions of him:

[kebriones]

Here's a closeup of him face because Tumblr destroys my files as usual.

[unender]

✩ ‎

[kindliess]

Your offering is good enough.

Your prayer is perfect the way it is

Your altar does not have to be extravagant or expensive. Simple ones are just as powerful.

You are good enough. The gods love you and want the best for you. They are here to lift us up, so don’t beat yourself down.

[nonebinary-leftbeef]

NO WAY

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

I’ve been doxxed 😨

[thetetra]

I once worked on a phone campaign to disallow the trees around your crater from being cut down...

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

I am deeply deeply in love with you 💙 Thanks so much for your conservation effort!

It’s the small things we all do together that can make a big difference! 💙💙💙💙 And you’ve done it!!!

[pacificnorthwesterngothic]

People just gotta know what Crater Lake and Wizard Island looks like

[silent-calling]

What in the Skyrim

[jenroses]

been there several times. And yeah, Skyrim feels super duper Oregon in a lot of ways.

[fitzreiley]

We gonna talk about Crater Lake, and Wizard Island and not mention the Old Man of the Lake?

The Old Man of the Lake is a log that floats around the lake. It is somewhat strange in that it floats vertically. It's roughly 30 feet tall, with only about 5 or so feet sticking out above the surface of the water. It was first 'offically' recorded in the early 20th century, though there are oral reports of it as far back as 1896 (and likely earlier still given the cultural importance of Crater Lake to the Klamath tribe of that area.

The Old Man should have rotted away long ago or at the very least become waterlogged and sank into the water fully, but nope. Over a hundred years, and there is this log still in the water just floating.

So y'know how I said the fact that it floats vertically was 'somewhat strange'? Let's get into some actual strange territory regarding the Old Man. It moves. Against the wind. It has been recorded moving in paths that do not make sense, never getting stuck on the shore of Wizard Island, nor the area of shore around the lake. Now that's strange.

So now let's get freaky: The free-floating Old Man posed a hazard to boats since it moves, and only a small portion of it was above water. (though personal boats are no longer allowed on the lake) Anyway, in 1988 a team was using a small submersible to explore the lake. The scientist figured it'd be a good idea to moor the Old Man near the coast of Wizard Island out of their way, for safety. So they tied some rope to it, to move the Old Man. As soon as they did so, the clear blue skies of a warm August day turned dark. The wind kicked up, bad, and it started to rain, then hail, then snow in the span of a few minutes...again in August. Now snow in that area is common, but not in the summer months. It gets super warm in that area in summer (like 70 to 90 degrees on average) So the scientists decided to nope the fuck out of the water, because of this freak storm. They unmoored the Old Man, preparing to get the fuck out of dodge of this summer snowstorm. As soon as the rope loosened and was in the water, as quickly as the storm had come on them, the darkened skies cleared and it was once more a fine sunny summer day.

As a kid, I spent my summers with my family who lives like... 40 some odd miles from Crater Lake National Park so I had this knowledge just kinda buried in my head somewhere.

[bogleech]

I excitedly added a thing about the old man before I checked the notes so now I'm gonna reblog this great story instead but here is the old man!!!

"The Old Man floats vertically through the lake on a calm day"

"THE OLD MAN FLOATS. VERTICALLY. THROUGH THE LAKE ON A CALM DAY"

!!!!!!!!!!

[headspace-hotel]

Finally

Cryptobotany

[m1male2]

Cariátides, Acrópolis, Atenas

[specialagentartemis]

ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google "Hobby Lobby" and get a page full of results that make me go "wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq"

[specialagentartemis]

#sorry what??? #I knew them as the store with the Christian right wing owners that refused to pay for employee birth control as part of health insurance #what is this about cuneiform tablet looting

They are also that! And it comes from the same place.

Since 2009, the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby started taking advantage of the wars in Iraq to buy stolen and looted cuneiform tablets and clay artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia. A lot of them were suspected to have been stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad in the chaos of the US invasion in 2003. The Hobby Lobby owners used HL profits to smuggle these artifacts into the US (taking them out of Iraq is illegal so they listed them as tile samples from Turkey and Israel, more friendly nations to the US). Eventually the customs officials seized them, and the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in 2017 when the news really broke about just how many ancient Middle Eastern artifacts were smuggled into the country. They were doing this to stock their "Museum of the Bible" that purports to prove the literal truth of the Bible... using stolen Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, somehow. Idk.

They also had sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls that turned out to be forgeries but that's only tangentially related.

Hobby Lobby and its owners were fined and ordered to return, again, thousands of artifacts back to Iraq. For years they KEPT finding more artifacts of Hobby Lobby's that turned out to be stolen, looted, and smuggled. It's one of the biggest artifact smuggling scandals in recent history. And it separated artifacts from their context and permanently damaged the ability to learn new things from them, even though archaeologists subsequently have been trying.

The court case was called "United States v. Approximately Four Hundred and Fifty Cuneiform Tablets."

[catchymemes]

[broomsick]

I don’t think we are meant to fear the Gods. Not even Gods of storms, death, or war. To believe in them is to accept them as they are. Don’t let anybody convince you that polytheists should fear the Gods. Be awe-struck, be humble before them if it feels right, but in this modern day and age, spirituality shouldn’t feel unsafe.

[theslowesthnery]

the wretched abomination known as the minotaur has discovered some chalk

[creature-wizard]

If you're leaving Christianity and getting into some form of paganism, you should check and see whether you've got any internalized "faithmaxxing/worshipmaxxing is the only true way to be spiritual" going on, and if so, work on it. Stuff like thinking you need to have perfect faith in your deities at all times or thinking you need to practice 3.5 spells per day to be A Real Witch. You're going to mess yourself up if you carry on with that.

[holy-ring]

people who worship or work with hermes!! tell me about what he's like :)

[volt-witch]

Man, where do I start. It's been a little over a decade now and he's never missed a beat. He can be a little intense in his messaging for me, but clear and concise. For me he's never far. He may be the busiest god but he somehow manages to make time for a lot. I have a lot to learn from him still and he's such a wonderful diety that I'm glad is in my life in some measure. I sometimes carry a travel altar for him for long distances and say a small prayer to him for my commute.

He can be a lot of fun, and he gives me the impression that he's one of those gods that's closest to/more amenable to people. I keep an altar to him, on a wall shelf facing the main door.

Sometimes, when I'm in a financial bind, I find sudden funds I've hidden away or forgot about. Or, if I'm out and about, and someone asks me for directions, I am honoring him by helping them out. Or I'll lose something and i take it as him 'borrowing' it because i always find it in a place i swore i checked (like my glasses recently). It's a daily thing for me! He's an active presence in my life and his signs aren't hard to find or figure out. I love him, he's great.

[thegodwhocums]

so has anyone done one of those Barbie memes of Dionysos yet or

[thegodwhocums]

you get it

[thegodwhocums]

@deermouth I made u a present

[finelythreadedsky]

i just think it's neat that odysseus gets put in a position where he has to kill his child to avoid going to war and he can't do it and then agamemnon gets put in a position where he has to kill his child to go to war and he does it

[femme-foucault]

[thoodleoo]

dionysus big naturals

[thoodleoo]

hey so this is simultaneously the best and worst reply you could have ever made to my post

[nyaoi-warrior]

[judgejudyofficial]

[theblasianwitch]

[teawitch]

Oh, the irony of it all!

I understand what he’s trying say but growing up Catholic in the bible belt, i was constantly told all this stuff with saints, and Mary, and candles was pagan. Now several decades into my practice, I’m being told all this Pagan stuff with deities and candles and such is Christian.

[volt-witch]

Agree. I have never found having an altar as a pagan to be a "problem", this is why I stay the hell off of "witchtok" and tiktok at large. I get what he's saying and my gods are in every aspect of my life but having an alter isn't 'problematic'. A cursory read about ancient religions will give you specific information about how the gods were kept in households, in different cultures..

Specifically in hellenic practice they are called "household" gods. Whether or not you want to keep an altar is up to you and the kind of relationship that you have with your deities.

[creature-wizard]

New Age is a poisoned chalice.

MASSIVE CW for racism and genocide up ahead. So, New Age ultimately goes back to Theosophy, which was primarily founded by Helena Blavatsky. Here's a paragraph Blavatsky wrote herself in her own book The Secret Doctrine: Mankind is obviously divided into God-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Âryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, no generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Âryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so-called. The “Sacred Spark” is missing in them, and it is they who are the only inferior races on the Globe, now happily— owing to the wise adjustment of Nature which ever works in that direction—fast dying out. Verily mankind is “of one blood,” but not of the same essence . We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in Nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent. This is the kind of sentiment the New Age movement came out of, and it's not any better today - New Agers are still simping for genocide, whether they're looking forward to people dying from climate change or eagerly awaiting the day Trump and his loyalists enact a second Holocaust. You don't have to dig very far at all to find videos and blogs expressing these very sentiments. New Agers, by the way, are the people pushing things like: -Soulmates and twin flames -The Law of Attraction/Law of Assumption/Manifestation -"Low vibrational frequency" vs. "high vibrational frequency" -Karmic debt -DNA upgrades/DNA activation/light code activation -Ascension to 5D -The existence of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu -Ancient aliens -Starseeds So yeah, watch out for this stuff (it's unfortunately all too common on witchblr and WitchTok), and be aware that though it might look harmless on the surface, it's all rotten underneath.