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@wxitch
Dance! Dance! DANCE!!! [Support me on patreon!]
I was going to rewatch 1931 Dracula again tonight and just as I turned it on a BAT started flying around at my window and wouldn’t go away and I’ve never seen a bat at my house before and let me tell you I’ve been so gay touched starved this quarantine I was about ready to risk letting a wild bat in my room if it meant it could possibly be one tall, Sexy vampire
Ah rabies
But what if the bat was from my secret gay vampire admirer
one day i'll have a little cottage with an oversized bookshelf and a vegetable patch and a big kitchen where i can bake to my heart's content and i won't have a single worry
i’ve written before about how uncomfortable it is being Jewish in most witchcraft/magic/occult spaces, but right now i’m feeling it particularly acutely as i try to navigate this queer & trans witchy renaissance we seem to be having (which is, i think, a direct response to the terror & loss of control we all feel in 2017 - magic has always been about resistance & survival to me & a lot of other people)
i’m tired. i’m scared a lot of the time. i want community & inspiration to help keep me going, so i reach for something like a zine that bills itself as an inclusive mix of queer & trans voices on witchcraft, resistance, activism - because it’s a group of marginalized folks, i (maybe foolishly) have this expectation of seeing myself in it, or of the editors being conscious of the many forms of cultural appropriation that happen in these spaces & working to educate about them
but what i’m finding, over and over, is two things: the first is that despite the fact that we exist in greater numbers than i’d ever have expected, there are no Jewish voices in any of the witchcraft-focused publications (indie or otherwise) i’ve ever encountered. the second thing, that cultural appropriation of Judaism & other forms of pervasive anti-semitism DO exist in these publications, just makes the lack of Jewish perspectives more glaring
so in the interest of being direct, here are a few things the queer & trans witchcraft community (i’d like to ask the ENTIRE witchcraft community, but i am speaking to people with whom i share something right now) can do & think about to help:
include us. if you didn’t think that any Jewish folks were involved in witchy communities, ask yourself why! is it because you thought Judaism was a religion only? or incompatible with ideas about magic? Judaism is an ethnicity & a culture - or more truthfully, a group of ethnicities & cultures - with long & complex histories of magic, mysticism & folklore. some of it is considered traditionally “kosher” & some of it isn’t! our relationships to that are individual, fascinating, & worth being shared!
stop throwing around the words “Abrahamic” & “Judeo-Christian” - especially when you want to talk about cultural values or historical oppression. 9 times out of 10, you just mean Christianity. yes, we share some text, but we have VERY different relationships to it. plus, if you’re talking specifically about the persecution of people believed to be witches, that’s the history of Jews being murdered by Christians. honestly just do us a favor & remove “Judeo-Christian” from your vocabulary, there’s almost no context where it’s an accurate description of anything.
educate yourself about appropriation. i should never have to see someone mention “practicing Kabbalah” in a zine that includes no Jewish people. our mysticism is connected to our culture, our history, our faith - not only do you have no business taking it, what could it possibly mean to you without its context?
understand that anti-semitism runs deeper than current appropriation - if you engage at all with any Western occultist or “ceremonial magic” literature or practice, you need to learn its history. what does it mean that the 15th century grimoire you’re drawing inspiration from contains Hebrew & calls itself Solomonic, but has no actual connection to Jewish people? what does it mean that the person who created the most iconic image of Baphomet, something beloved by a lot of queer & trans witches for being androgynous, gave himself a fake Hebrew name? i’m not asking you to throw all of these concepts & traditions out entirely - i have something of a love/hate relationship with ceremonial occultism myself, i collect vintage & antique things related to it & some of it is really interesting - but please at the very least educate yourself about it. specifically, educate yourself about how medieval Jews were treated while non-Jewish occultists were incorporating (often misunderstood or mangled) Jewish mysticism, language & folk practices into their frameworks.
if you’ve stayed with me this far, i appreciate it - i know this post is long & that confronting this stuff can be difficult, but i urge you to do some reading & listening before you push back. i’m writing this because i want to see things change - i want to see communities where people connect meaningfully to their own heritages & participate in actual cultural exchange & learning based in equity & mutual support.
i’m speaking to my own experience, but all of this goes for ANY marginalized culture/tradition being “drawn from” in witchcraft communities without actually including members of said culture.
many of us got involved in witchy things because we felt locked out of mainstream religious practice due to a mix of oppressions - let’s not replicate that in our own spaces.
What I would like to do now…
in that elevator
(from S101 and S301)
i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”
When my sister and I were kids we had this one action figure, who was actually a brutalized batman doll without his cape (the dog chewed half his head, too), who we dubbed ‘Evil Chancellor Traytor’. The idea was that in the fictional society of our toys, ‘chancellor’ just came with the word ‘evil’ in front of it, as a matter of ancient tradition. Like ‘grand’ or ‘high’ or something along those lines.
Anyway, the running gag was that the king (an old Power Rangers knock-off doll) had absolute and unwavering faith in Evil Chancellor Traytor, who basically comported himself like a mix between Grima Wormtongue and Jafar from the Aladdin movies. Everyone was always sure that Evil Chancellor Traytor had something to do with the nefarious scheme of the day. The dude even carried around a poisoned knife called ‘the kingslayer’.
The additional twist on the joke, though, was that he never was behind anything. The king was actually right. Evil Chancellor Traytor was the most devoted civil servant in the entire Action Figure Dystopia. He spent his nights working on writing up new legislature to ensure that broken toys had access to mobility devices, was always on the lookout to acquire new shoeboxes for expanding city infrastructure, and drafted a proposal that once got half the ‘settlement’ in my sister and I’s closet moved to the upper shelf so that vulnerable toys were less likely to be snatched up by the dog.
The knife, as it turned out, was as symbolic as the ‘evil’ in his name. See, Action Figure Dystopia had a long history of corrupted monarchs getting too big for their thrones and exploiting the underclasses. The job of the Evil Chancellor was to always remain vigilant, and loyally serve a good ruler - or, if the regent should became a despot, to slay them on behalf of the people.
But since killing the king would be a terrible crime, the Evil Chancellor had to be the kind of person who would willingly die to spare the people from the plight of a wicked leader; because the murder would be pinned on them, in order to keep the ‘machinery of politics’ working as smoothly as ever.
Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor had a diary, in which my sister I would take turns writing out the most over-the-top good shit he’d done behind the scenes. Usually after everyone else had finished talking shit about him. I don’t know why but we got the biggest kick out of being like:
Barbie With the Unfortunate Haircut: Oh that Evil Chancellor Traytor! Why can’t the king see how wicked he is?!
Charmander From the Vending Machine: Char!
Jurassic Park Toy of Jeff Goldblum With Disturbingly Realistic Face: At least if someone puts a knife in the king’s back, we’ll know where to look!
Evil Chancellor Traytor’s Diary: Today I was feeding ducks at the park when I noticed another legless action figure sitting by the benches. I put a hundred dollars into his bag while he wasn’t looking. I really need to increase budgeting to the medical treatment centers. If only we had enough glue, I think we would see far fewer toys trying to get by without limbs… *insert iconic evil laugh*
Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor eventually fell victim to one of my mom’s cleaning sprees, and she decided he was too busted up to keep and tossed him out. My littler brother, who tended to follow my sister and I’s games like he was watching a daily soap opera, cried so hard that we had to do a special ‘episode’ where one of the toys found the Evil Chancellor’s diary, and so he got a big huge memorial and the king threw himself into the empty grave and then ordered the toys driving the toy bulldozer to bury him so that ‘Traytor’s grave would have a body’ (this seemed very important for some reason).
And then we had the Quest For a New King. Somehow or another that ended up being a giant rubber snake called ‘Tyrant King Cobra’.
::closes tab, shuts off computer, and proceeds to have the best day ever just by knowing this exists::
i will always reblog Evil Chancellor Traytor
tbh that’s some A-grade worldbuilding and use of tropes, these kids should be hired to direct movies instead of crusty idiots like Michael Bay
This has more plot development than anything else I have ever seen or read
Strawberries going ❤🍓
"That's why the British museum is so busy all the time. No British people ever go in there, it's full of people from abroad looking at their own stuff."
when you are just hanging out
true romance
Just so y'all know, there’s more lol
Today’s aesthetic: old-timey alchemsts insisting they can totally turn lead into gold, but making sure the described procedure is so expensive it would cost more than the resulting gold is worth so nobody asks them to actually do it.
Embroidery Hoops
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I GASPED SO FUCKIN HARD OMG
“Knots are very sinister things, much used by witches, because to tie a knot is magically to tie and impede the person who is the target of the spell. An example is the terrible death talisman of the string with nine knots, sometimes called ‘the witches ladder’. The string is tied with a fierce concentration of hatred against an enemy and hidden somewhere close to him. The knots slowly throttle the life out of him and he dies. The only cure is to find the string in time and untie the knot. Witches sometimes tied knots to stop cows from giving milk, but their main use in witchcraft is to prevent a couple from enjoying the pleasures of the bed. Jean Bodin, the political philosopher who was also an authority on witchcraft, was told by a witch at Poitiers in 1567 that there were more than fifty ways of tying a knot for this purpose. The knot could impede the man alone or the woman alone for a day or a year or a lifetime. It could make one love the other, but be hated in return, or it could make the pair tear each other with their nails in love-making. Different types of knot would prevent intercourse or procreation or urination.”
— Richard Cavendish - The Black Arts : A Concise History of Witchcraft, Demonology, Astrology, and Other Mystical Practices Throughout the Ages