alaratheawful

[alaratheawful]

The ableism in this post is so ironic. Like, SO ironic.

Read about the controversy and hate towards @crippled-pvp, so I thought I’d add something.

I am very mentally disabled and decently physically disabled. I am very obviously disabled in both ways. If someone watched me for more than 5 seconds they would know (if I’m not using mobility aids). Thought I’d point out my ‘qualifications.’

He is correct. Plainly put, people with mental disabilities that do not affect mobility or abilities do not get to say that ‘their issues matter too’ when it comes to accessibility.

The difference between the two types of accessibility is that one can be provided yourself.

If I cannot get up the stairs, I cannot just pull a ramp or elevator or step out of nowhere. If I start to pass out, I cannot just unload a chair to sit on. I cannot magically fix my disabilities to do something that is inaccessible to me.

If I am having a bad sensory day, I can bring headphones or my own food or stim toys or whatever I need. If I am having a panic attack, I am able to remove myself from the situation. If I randomly switch out, I am able to adapt or, again, remove myself from the situation.

I am mentally able to go to parades and parties and things that trigger any one of my mental disabilities. Because I know I can a) accommodate myself or b) leave. And I still get the experience. I am not able to go to parades and parties and things that trigger my physical disabilities, even on good days where a mobility aid is not needed. I cannot accommodate a hike, or stairs, or a ramp that’s too steep. And I do not have the option to.

There are ways you can prevent and deal with things from mental disabilities. There are none for us physically disabled people.

That is the difference.

[alaratheawful]

i love posting on tiktok/witchtok but the people there,,,,, are so,,,,, mean and half the time its for no reason

like i think there were mean people, and then nice people got fed up with mean people and become mean in advance

like i posted a comment about the salt/eggshell/lemon hex thing, made sure to be respectful and leave room for opposing viewpoints, like i was just offering new ideas. i like thinking of uncommon ways to do things. it was at worst a neutral comment

and the creator didnt acknowledge half of what i said and was condescending at the other half, and their comments?? would have been addressed??? if they read what i said?????????????????

its like the second time this week someone was rude to me on witchtok when i was being neutral and offering new viewpoints and its so discouraging. i think people are used to a different viewpoint meaning someone is challenging you maliciously, which to be fair on tiktok is more likely whats happening. but goddamn.

so much of witchtok is focused with making fun of people regardless of if its an actual issue or not. like okay you think cultural appropriation is cringe. thats cool, ca is actually harmful and an intrusion into another cultures business. but why are you so preoccupied with hating on beginner witches, spell jars, people using ___ in a ___ spell, people who give gummy bears as offerings, etc. yall spend so much time pointing fingers at everyone who does something you dont like, when it was never your business. how do you expect to call this a "witchy community".

what community? you hate everyone here

i get why so many people leave. im getting to the point where im either tired enough to just stop filtering and post the stuff that'll get me "delulu" type troll comments, or tired enough to stop posting. until then all my unconventional hex ideas are going here. salt is next

[alaratheawful]

happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.

[alaratheawful]

[alaratheawful]

If you cannot credit creators of the content you're sharing, YOU SHOULD NOT HE SHARING CONTENT. I'm pretty shook to see how many people this is affecting.

With what's all going around, if any of you recognize my original content being posted without credit to me on any platforms (discord or other social media), please let me know.

[alaratheawful]

While I don't mind people linking any of my posts off-site with proper credit, if you happen to see anyone copy/pasting my stuff and resposting it, I'd love a head's up :)

[alaratheawful]

There's something else I really can't get off my mind, which is:

Occult knowledge loses so much value when it's stripped from its context.

There is so much watering down of occult knowledge and a major part of that is that nobody seems to know where anything comes from.

Taking what someone writes, copy/pasting that info onto a separate platform, and refusing to share who actually wrote it, is actively deteriorating the pool of occult knowledge.

You aren't "archiving" or "saving" anything. You're muddying the waters.

Acting like you can stripmine people's beliefs for what looks good to your followers, or what makes you seem like you're knowledgeable, is functionally "core witchcraft" in the vein of "core shamanism." You're saying context, beliefs, culture, spirituality, and community don't matter - all that matters is a ritual or technique split from its source.

How can you claim to be a helper to the community when you are feeding people stolen knowledge stripped from its own necessary context?

Trying to maintain my own context on this platform with my name attached to everything is difficult enough. Like last year, when I was kicking and screaming about how my witchcraft is not paganism.

And not to mention, like...

People should be able to avoid individuals in the community they don't like. Imagine if someone is deeply uncomfortable with devil-adjacent witchcraft, and due to their spiritual beliefs, doesn't want to work with anything written by a diabolist.

And then someone comes along and copy/pastes my posts about reading tarot, or energy work, or other content that I learned by working with a devil. And now, the context is lost that this content was learned by channeling a devil entity, and people may work with it who would never, ever choose to engage with that material if they knew where it came from.

That's messed up, right?

Like, idk.

I truly do not understand how hard it is to copy/paste the URL. You're already there copying paragraphs of text at a time. Why would you not want people to know where information comes from?

[alaratheawful]

Yeah, if you're a practicing witch today, you owe a debt of gratitude to Doreen Valiente.

If you can't see how, it says a lot about your ability to see beyond the end of your nose - or your own personal practice.

Die mad about it idk.

[alaratheawful]

Oh looky, here some a 3edgy5u tumblr user inserting a ton of assumptions about someone they have never previously interacted with and attempting to make themselves a white knight by saying a bunch of shit I never said, and then saying how those things are wrong. You probably read this in an argumentative tone, too.

Go drink some blue-light water and touch some grass. And don't tell people to block you, that's cringe AF. I don't care what you have to say, and in fact wasn't even addressing you, so clearly you're looking for a fight. And with such a failed understanding of difference in culture between the 40's and now, someone such as yourself in entirely incapable of having anything less than a purely biased shouting match.

So thanks but no thanks. Go touch some grass.

On Blue being a "healing color"

"If, then, one can obtain a stoppered bottle or decanter of richly coloured blue glass, it can be used to get the benefit of this healing colour. Fill the bottle with water and stand it in a sunlit place for a couple of days. To drink this water will be beneficial to health and psychic sensitivity.

Alternatively, get a piece of deep blue glass and frame it so that the sharp edges are covered. Hold this glass so that the sunlight shines through it and the coloured ray is directed upon any part of the body affected by illness, preferably upon the bare skin. Do this for as long as you conveniently can, up to about half and hour at a time. Many beneficial results have been claimed from this practice. Electric lights is sometimes used to shine through the glass but warm natural sunlight is best, if available."

(p. 59 , Natural Magic, Doreen Valiente)

Just hear me out friends, just hear me out okay. Just listen. Okay, hear me. Maybe. .... maybe... it's the sunlight. And not the color of the light that's doing something. I KNOW I MIGHT be talking out my ass for a minute, but maybe.

Also I am very amused at the idea of drinking stagnant water for psychic abilities. Need a remind yall of the book that ... was like "Don't drink the stagnant water beside your bed because a ghost done did touched it."

I mean I know she's saying to stopper it. But still. Also ghosts are afraid of blue glass (according to a bit of Southern American lore hence the trees with the blue glass). But like. it's a bit of a folk custom nah? The blue glass thing? Interesting no?

[alaratheawful]

"When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused."

- Rilke letter to wife Clara, 1903

[alaratheawful]

i saw the words “ur not the first person in your lineage to be queer” and it’s rocking me to my core. how many generations down the line did one of my ancestors feel the way i did, feel differently than i did and so damn queerly it was a crime? how many of us were there? did they have hope? did they find peace? i don’t know. at the very least, maybe i am proof their identity was never wasted. reincarnated.

[alaratheawful]

At GlossyFeathers specifically...

I'm sorry...that last line...are we talking shit about the boundary defying, queer-supporting, Nazi-fighting British spy who was part of an interracial marriage in the 30's - turned Mother of Modern Witchcraft who is Doreen Valiente? The same woman who dealt with Gerald Gardner, Robert Cochrane, and various other men of highly inflated ego claiming long-standing familial traditions on multiple occasions, without whom it is 99.99% likely that modern witchcraft wouldn't have taken off in the first place? The self-same woman who took the Gardnerian book of shadows and made it what it is today by removing the overtly stolen OTO and Thelema elements, then providing some of the most iconic poems and invocations we have today?

We will not stand for the slander of Mama Doreen. You may not agree with Doreen, but Doreen is THE reason you practice witchcraft today and even have the ability to be that snide about healing colors, Glossy.

Literally the color of the ocean was, and is still known to help calm the mind. The sea heals a broken heart is what we say in my home, and lots of us believe it's because of the color, because I live in the South and we know about blue in the sea and on the porch. And its just as protective as it is healing. Your mention of its history in storing and identifying poisonous apothecary material speaks exactly to that quality of protection.

There are also legit medical studies on the benefits of deep blue light therapy. Not the garish and bright blue lights of cell-phones, but various wavelengths of blue are use for skin treatments, mental health, and even cancer treatments.

Witchcraft is an idiosyncratic practice. It is based on our on personal understanding and recognition of the patterns in the world around. Everyone perceives the world differently, ergo everyone's witchcraft will look a little different. But beyond that, the color blue had been considered healing for centuries before Doreen wrote a single word. And further still, Doreen didn't put anything to paper she did not actually do. If she wrote it, she did it. She doesn't tell us that nothing else will work ever. She doesn't demand we do this. She provides an example of something she's had success with for us to use if we should ever need it.

Doreen Valiente held an interest in folk-magic from the time she was a child. She began practicing witchcraft at 31, and kept at it until she passed at 77. That's 46 years of experience in witchcraft, magic, and occultism. To treat 46 years worth of experience as not worthy of consideration is pure ego - the same ego that drove Doreen to leave Gardner's coven and seek out other practitioners.

It was also Doreen Valiente who stood up and told the witchcraft community that it needed queer people to survive, at a time when many witchcraft groups were trying to oust queer people for not fitting the male-female dichotomy of their "perfect" little world. Doreen said "fuck that" and gave an impassioned speech about queer rights in the craft, making space for queer folks to safely step into the craft which she arguable created.

The viewpoint from which you are looking at this seems to be "well we're modern so we know better." But I would argue "we're modern, so we see less." We see the blue of our phone screens and computers and completely forget about the blue of the sky, of the sea, of blueberries and butterfly pea flower and cobalt fish floats. Blue from a computer screen causes eye-strain certainly, and if that's the only blue you know, your perception will be that blue is harmful.

But when you stop, look a little deeper, a little further back before we had *motions around* all this, you see that blue has been sacred, powerful, and yes, healing, for a very, very long time. It isn't hard to see why, unless we refuse those older experiences for our newer ones. We may have a more refined theoretical knowledge of magic, but we do NOT have a better functional knowledge if it, because we don't live with it like our ancestors did - even in 1953.

So let's take a moment and pay our respects to Doreen Valiente, without whom queers would have struggled much longer to enter the craft, without whom the "traditional witchcraft" community would be extremely lessened, and without whom the modern witchcraft movement likely never would have taken off to such glorious heights, meaning most of us would not be practicing.

On Blue being a "healing color"

"If, then, one can obtain a stoppered bottle or decanter of richly coloured blue glass, it can be used to get the benefit of this healing colour. Fill the bottle with water and stand it in a sunlit place for a couple of days. To drink this water will be beneficial to health and psychic sensitivity.

Alternatively, get a piece of deep blue glass and frame it so that the sharp edges are covered. Hold this glass so that the sunlight shines through it and the coloured ray is directed upon any part of the body affected by illness, preferably upon the bare skin. Do this for as long as you conveniently can, up to about half and hour at a time. Many beneficial results have been claimed from this practice. Electric lights is sometimes used to shine through the glass but warm natural sunlight is best, if available."

(p. 59 , Natural Magic, Doreen Valiente)

Just hear me out friends, just hear me out okay. Just listen. Okay, hear me. Maybe. .... maybe... it's the sunlight. And not the color of the light that's doing something. I KNOW I MIGHT be talking out my ass for a minute, but maybe.

Also I am very amused at the idea of drinking stagnant water for psychic abilities. Need a remind yall of the book that ... was like "Don't drink the stagnant water beside your bed because a ghost done did touched it."

I mean I know she's saying to stopper it. But still. Also ghosts are afraid of blue glass (according to a bit of Southern American lore hence the trees with the blue glass). But like. it's a bit of a folk custom nah? The blue glass thing? Interesting no?

[alaratheawful]

[alaratheawful]

I appreciate this, because I tend to try and do all of it in one fell swoop and it can be...draining...to say the least.

You can also cast a single spell in many stages over many days.

In the way I work even a simple spell may have many components.

So the first session can be imbuing the vessel with metaphysical power to prepare it for holding a spell (same concept as seasoning the cast iron, really).

Second session can be calling certain Powers and asking them to imprint their influence on the object.

Third session can be feeding the connection to those imprinted Powers and finally announcing spell intent.

Fourth session can be then actually "casting the spell," which now at this point has a lot less work going into it, and things will flow a lot more smoothly, because of all the prep work.

Fifth session can be activating or releasing. Etc etc.

Which may sound like a lot of steps, but when I do a spell I have to do all those steps anyway. My point is, if your spellcasting style has a lot of steps, maybe it's possible to redistribute the workload by working one spell over multiple stages.

[alaratheawful]

Yes. Yes, do this.

listen. listen. listen.

adapt your craft to your culture.

[alaratheawful]

Little Tips:

Fire is a cleansing agent and is rather good at what it does. To use it, take a good candle (white or black is generally used but you can actually use a variety of colours), some oil and some salt. Walk through each of the rooms of the house and mark a cross on each of the walls with the candle, conjuring the negative energy to go into the candle before rubbing it with oil and salt to cleanse and bind the energy and burning it away by fire. The wax is then sprinkled with holy salt and disposed.

If you do a banishing of negativity and someone reacts negatively to it, just know.

It's always good to have a bottle of water on your shrine when you pray, always good. During the prayer, the water gets nice and infused with that energy and can be used for other spells.

Spend time with your spirits. Although I still firmly believe in the formality between devotee and spirit as per my mother's raising, I still have portuguese influence where I almost consider the spirits as close friends, mothers, fathers and patriarchs and matriarchs. Sometimes, it's good to just sit down with them and talk or pray or simply just waking up, going to the altar and kissing it while saying good morning.

[alaratheawful]

Hello Chicken! What do you think of manifestation journals? What separates wishes and prayers from spells practically speaking?

What a loaded question.

As for manifestation journals themselves, I gave it a quick google. These seem very intertwined with "law of attraction" beliefs, which I myself do not believe in. However, in general I find the concept of positive, goal-oriented, optimistic journaling to be very helpful and relaxing. I say, if a manifesting journal makes you happy, do it! Just don't quit your day job.

To your second question, the short answer is: you will never ever be able to get more than three people to agree on the same answer at any one time, and two of them will still have their own caveats and addendums to the group answer.

(Everything below is my beliefs, I'm not prefacing every single paragraph with "this is what I believe," but just try to keep in mind... it's just what I believe:)

Wishes are not prayers. There is a big difference between me sitting here thinking, "I wish I had some hashbrowns," and me facing a god or other honorable spirit and praying to them.

A passing thought, or something within my mind that I really desire, is not automatically magical and "the universe" is not automatically conspiring to get me what I want. A passing thought, or wanting something, is not magical, is not spellwork, and is not prayer.

Prayers are not spells, and not all prayers are about getting something. It seems germane to point out that not all prayer is "putting your order in." A great deal of prayer is about love, devotion, and faith, where nothing at all is expected in return.

Communicating with gods and spirits is neither a wishful thought within my brain, nor an act of spellwork.

Prayer may be utilized within spells. However, praying to ask the gods for something (or letting them know you want it without even asking for it) is not the same as petitioning to get it, nor is it the same as paying for it.

Spells are magical acts which requires, A) the agency of the spellcaster, and B) personal sacrifice, in order to become manifest. Like it or not, we live in a universe with actual rules. One of these rules is "effect follows cause." Nobody gets something from nothing.

What I believe separates acts of magic from wistful thinking and "sending requests" for the universe to spit out, is that acts of magic require active involvement and personal sacrifice.

Why do spells work? Because power is sacrificed at that altar - power which could go to something else, or fuel something else, is captured and put into the spell.

"Where attention goes, energy flows" is indeed true - but there is a marked difference between the power of our everyday minds, and the thoughts produced when resting on the inner throne of power that practitioners first find and then reclaim. Finding that throne takes sacrifice. Learning to crown yourself with its power takes sacrifice. Spending that power is a sacrifice.

No act which side-steps agency of the practitioner is a spell. The practitioner must actively intervene. Journaling wishes in may be very relaxing and enjoyable (and I honestly support it, I think it's good for mental health), but it is not an active intervention. Casual prayer to gods may be important, supportive, and healing, but depending on how you do it its probably not active intervention by the practitioner either.