glarawelmagolben

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In case anyone is looking for a tarot spread to do this New Year’s Eve

Mags talks Tarot: Turning of the Year spread

I created this spread to provide insight into what the outgoing year brought to my life, where I stand now, and what the coming year will bring.

I do mine on 31st October each year but it works equally as well as a New Year’s Eve spread, or a birthday spread, or at a personally significant point of the year. A proviso of mine is that I will not do this reading twice for one person within the same twelve months and personally feel that it would lose something if it was used more often, however YMMV.

This is a large spread and it usually takes me at least an hour to complete a reading, so you’ll want to make sure you’ll not be interrupted for a while if you choose to do it.

1. Where I am now in respect of my professional life. 2. Where I am now in respect of my personal life. 3. Where I am now in respect of my inner life. 4. What the past year can teach me about my professional life. 5. What the past year can teach me about my personal life. 6. What the past year can teach me about my inner life. 7. What the coming year will bring me in respect of my professional life. 8. What the coming year will bring me in respect of my personal life. 9. What the coming year will bring me in respect of my inner life. 10. Month 1 (starting with the month following the day of the reading – so for a New Year’s reading, this would be January) 11. Month 2 12. Month 3 13. Month 4 14. Month 5 15. Month 6 16. Month 7 17. Month 8 18. Month 9 19. Month 10 20. Month 11 21. Month 12

The first nine cards need no explanation as to what they are there to do, however I would say that you are at perfect liberty to change the focus of this spread if the professional/personal/inner life is not the best fit for you.  I’ve also read this spread using emotionally/physically/spiritually, financially/physically/intellectually, and body/mind/spirit – it’s all about what’s important to you. Use it to look into the three things that what you want to focus on in the coming year.

The final twelve cards are intended to elucidate on the themes provided by cards 7, 8 & 9 and to give a flavour of what each month may hold. They benefit from being looked at as a group rather than taking each card in isolation. Read them as a story about your journey through the coming year!

I also recommend taking into account the balance of the spread as you read:

Major vs Minor arcana; which are there more of?

If it’s major, then the coming year is going to be a very significant one. If they are clustered in one part of the year, then it’s giving you a much more specific timeline pointer, if they are spread evenly then it may be that the whole year will be important.

In relation to the minor arcana alone …

Which suit appears the most? Which suit appears the least? Is there a suit that doesn’t appear at all?

This will give you an indication of the theme of your year and indicate which areas of your life might be neglected unless you make an effort to focus on them.

Number wise, are you getting mostly low numbers, mostly high numbers or a mix?

These can give an indication of the stage you’re at with whatever element of your life is being highlighted by the cards and give you pointers as to where you need to grow.

Are there more court cards than number cards?

If so, it may be that your life is being strongly influenced by specific people, or it might be that these represent elements of yourself that will come into play at that time, or elements that you need to focus on.

If you have a card you use as a significator* ….

Did it appear? If so where?

One interpretation is that this is the point in the year (or element of the year past/ present/ to come if it turns up in cards 1 to 9) that is going to be particularly pertinent to you. When my significator turns up in this spread I usually draw an additional clarifier card (after I’ve finished drawing the rest of the spread) for that position to identify what it is about that point in the reading that is so personal.

On that note, please don’t be afraid to pull a clarifier card if there is an area of the spread that doesn’t make sense. However do make sure that you’ve thoroughly thought about the cards you’ve drawn before you start doing so. If you look at the spread and your gut reaction is to pull a host of clarifiers please be honest with yourself as to why you’re doing it. If it isn’t that you don’t understand what the cards mean but instead that you don’t like what they’re saying, it’s better to face up to that element of the reading (and possibly set aside some time to do a separate, focused reading specifically to work through that issue) than to draw another card in the hope that it will make the problem go away.

And finally … please also remember that this reading a snapshot of the year ahead at the moment you pull the cards – not a set in stone prediction that cannot be changed. This is going to give you an idea of what may happen so that you can get ready to meet it, allowing you to seize opportunities the year may bring and prepare/guard against the not-so-good things (forewarned is forearmed, after all!). It’s a spread to help you make the best of whatever comes your way and is not supposed to create anxiety or become something to beat yourself up about.

If you use the spread, please do let me know if it helped and if you tweak it (which you’re obviously more than welcome to do) please share that too!

*A significator is a card chosen from the deck that represents either you (if you’re reading for yourself) or the questioner (if you’re reading for someone else). Some people, myself included, have a card they identify with most and thus the appearance of it can be used as an additional element in readings. If you don’t have a significator, please don’t feel that you need to choose one!

[glarawelmagolben]

Discussing baby’s future

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Lennart Helje art

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The price for beauty is blood

[glarawelmagolben]

General Advice for Beginner Witches

A brief masterpost of some of my advice posts for beginner witches and the episodes of my podcast dealing with the same. (There is UPG here, particularly where marked, as I base a good deal of my advice on my own experience and observations of other witches.)

Hex Positive Podcast Episodes

Hex Positive, Ep. 04 - Advice for Beginner Witches (July 2020)

Hex Positive, Eps. 6-7 - Come In For A Spell 1 & 2 (Sept 2020)

Hex Positive, Ep. 12 - Witching From The Broom Closet (Jan 2021)

Hex Positive, Ep. 24 - Warding A Witchy Home (Dec 2021)

Hex Positive, Ep. 27 - When Inspo Takes A Holiday (March 2022)

General Tips & Advice

I Feel Like I Might Be A Witch...But I Don't Know

I Have Mental Health Issues - Can I Still Be A Witch?

Can I Still Be A Witch And Use Magic If I Take Medication?

How Do I Teach Myself To Believe In Magic?

How Does Magic Work? (upg ahoy)

Will I Be Possessed Or Haunted If I Try Witchcraft?

What Are Some Things I Can Do To Get Started?

How Can I Start My Practice If I Don't Have Tools Or Books?

How Do I Organize My Study Materials?

How Do I Contact A Deity?

How Do I Worship My Deity If I Can't Have An Altar?

Tips On Working With Deities And Spirits (here be upg)

My Intuitive Spark Feels Low - How Do I Get It Back?

I'm In A Slump - How Do I Get Out Of It?

I've Reached A Stopping Point - What Do I Do Next?

My Candle Is Flickering - Does It Mean Something Bad?

How Do I Make A Magic Circle For Spellcasting?

What Happens If I Get Interrupted While Casting A Spell?

Do I Need To Maintain Positive Vibes For My Spells To Work?

What Should I Do If I REALLY Want To Hex Someone?

How Do I Know / What Do I Do If I've Been Hexed?

How Do I Become More Skilled And More Powerful?

How Do I Know When I'm Ready For The Next Step In My Practice?

Additional Tips For Developing Your Practice

Witchcraft Exercise - Quantifying Your Craft

Witchcraft Exercise - Dig Through The Ditches

Witchcraft Exercise - The Book of Lessons

Witchcraft Exercise - Home Brews

Tips on How to Visualize and Construct Basic Wards

Practicing Your Warding Technique

Cleansing Before Warding / Warding A Shared Space

Refreshing / Patching Existing Wards

Non-Appropriative Herbs for Smoke-Cleansing

Smokeless Cleansing / Other Methods

Recommended Reading & Book Suggestions

[glarawelmagolben]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[glarawelmagolben]

I’d be hard pushed justify to the deities I worship how an offering whose creation caused harm on so many different levels could possible be anything but an insult.

Possibly insane question but what do y'all suppose the gods would think of AI devotional art? It's totally new territory as far as worship goes so I'm curious

[glarawelmagolben]

New Crow Time 🎀🏅

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I’m being cremated. I intend to leave nothing physical behind. Life is ephemeral and I will treat it as such.

In 5000 years it won't matter what books you read or what ideology you followed or the cool friends you had. All that matters will be the scraps of clothing you wore, the permanent markings on your body, the surgeries you had, and the method of preservation of your corpse.

[glarawelmagolben]

I'm glad that the Heathen and Pagan communities here in the UK are taking A stand against the AFA trying to get a foothold here.

[glarawelmagolben]

Witchcraft Exercises

Just a quick compilation of the posts I've made about exercises to help improve your craft. These can be used as journaling prompts, inspiration for activities, or as methods for pulling yourself out of a slump and recharging your witchy inspiration.

Witchcraft Exercise - Quantifying Your Craft

Witchcraft Exercise - Dig Through The Ditches

Witchcraft Exercise - The Book of Lessons

Witchcraft Exercise - Home Brews

Witchcraft Exercise - Witchy Inspo Journal

Witchcraft Exercise - Spring Cleaning

Witchcraft Exercise - Creating Correspondences

Witchcraft Exercise - Creating Your Own Runes

Witchcraft Exercise - Shakespearean Witchcraft

Witchcraft Exercise - Music To Witch By

Related Prompt - Music to Witch By

Most of these are also available in the May 2021 bonus episode of Hex Positive (check your favorite podcatcher).

Happy Witching!

(If you’re enjoying my content, please feel free to drop a little something in the tip jar or check out my published works on Amazon or in the Willow Wings Witch Shop. 😊)

[glarawelmagolben]

Moss and roots~

[glarawelmagolben]

Apologies for the rather random discussions below. One day I will learn not to engage with blatant provocative from bad actors. Anyway, normal service will now be resumed.

[glarawelmagolben]

I "persist" because I read your words to Neil and that's what they said. You started your ask to Neil as follows “I'm sorry Neil, although I love your writing and agree with your opinions on most subjects I have to disagree with you on the writer's strike. No one should have a more privileged life as a result of being clever and creative." The rest of your ask was incredibly wordy and just expanded on the second sentence.

I could not see anything on your blog to suggest you had clarified anything (other than a stand alone passive aggressive swipe at part of Neil's response to you) so I left my ask. I realise now, given that you replied to me rather than reblogging, it's because you seem to prefer replying to continue conversations.

In doing so this makes it much easier for you to obfuscate and complain people aren't understanding you when only the specific person you've replied to will know you've replied (and you have never reblogged your original ask to Neil onto your dash so no one can see what you said to start this going when they visit your blog). Anyone wanting to know if you said anything further would have to find the original post and dig through piles of notes on to see what else you have to say.

So I did the digging through to find your reply responses and even having done that mostly what I saw was you being snide, saying you didn't disagree with the strike even though you literally did use those words, and generally being belittling to people who responded to that. Given just how many people read your words and came to the same conclusion I did - there are so many replies and reblogs responding to you in a similar way to me in the notes to that post - I would suggest this is a problem stemming from how you are using words to express yourself, including your written tone.

All of which is to say, I have come to the conclusion that you do not want to own the full meaning of the words you write and the effect they have. You come across as the sort of person who confuses being rude with being honest, someone who uses age and claims of intellectual ability to demand respect for your opinions without offering any respect in return. The sort of person who routinely says "I'm sorry you found what I said/did upsetting" rather than "I'm sorry I upset you by saying/doing x". Basically not the sort of person worth having discussions with because you are clearly not acting in good faith.

You looked at the world, went “I had to struggle so everyone else must also struggle” instead of “I had to struggle so I must try to make sure no one else does”, and then you didn’t even have the self awareness to keep your vindictive bitterness to yourself. Surely someone with such a high IQ can see how awful that makes you.

So you think struggling is a bad thing? Why? I always thoroughly enjoyed the struggle. I still do. It's what life is all about. Also tends to be what stories are all about. Every country in the world has its own creation myth: the European countries decolonising from the yoke of the Roman Empire, the Americas and Africa and India decolonising from the European empires etc. Ancient empires had their own creation myths and 21st Century people have their own stories of "How I Came to Be". Everyone talks about their creation story. People either had good parents and a bad school or the other way around. Or an illness, or bullies in the school lunch room, or poverty, or fighting in a war. It's the stuff of all stories. How we all came to be. The struggles which made us who we are. Personally I always got a tremendous enjoyment out of braving the elements, defying expectations, beating the odds, getting things done under arduous conditions. Several people on here, yourself included, have decided or assumed that a hard life is a bad life or something to be avoided. But, au contraire, It's the struggle which makes character and the character which ends up with the joy of self discovery. If you don't have struggle and difficulty your stories will lack authenticity. If you've never carried a weight which too heavy for you and hurt yourself in process you will not be able to write convincingly of the feelings and physical sensations of some post-modern Sisyphus. If you have never lived for weeks on wild blackberries or beans on toast or leftovers then your description of that in a novel or short story will not ring true.

What are you going to do? Hope the actor or director has had a hard life and knows how to play the role in spite of the unrealistic script?

You've got to live life to write about life. You can't make a career out of writing about characters to whom nothing difficult ever happened.

I respect my long time friend Alby Stone who lives in South London who is retired and writes novels. He wrote a great book called "A Deeper Darkness" which takes place mostly in Siberia. I enjoyed that book and I respect him especially because I know that he went to Siberia and is describing a place he knows. He also travelled on the Orient Express.

When I write I write about experiences I have had. Things I know. Things which were hard and needed to be worked through. Grasping the bull, taking the nettle by the horns, mixing the what he metaphor.

The "vindictive bitterness" you mention doesn't live anywhere within me. That's probably "projection" as Carl Jung called it.

[glarawelmagolben]

No One Ever Helped Me So I Will Never Help Anyone Else & Do Not Believe Anyone Should Be Helped Ever is one of thee most loser mindsets btw

[glarawelmagolben]

There are so many things in this life that inherently make day to day living a struggle, many of them things that none of us can really do much about. So when there are struggles that can be ameliorated I am going to do everything in my power to make sure they are fixed. I’m not going to assume that my life is blueprint for everyone else’s like you are doing in the bloviating screed above. So if a group of people are standing up and saying “this thing is making our lives harder than they need to be” and what they’re asking for isn’t going to hurt anyone else then I’m going to support them.

Because this is about you stating you don’t support the people who work in the creative industries making a living from their own work. And I don’t see why those people, whose work is making a group of executives and shareholders very rich, don’t deserve to share in the money their time and effort has generated. And neither of your reasons, which seem to boil down to “I didn’t make that sort of money from it so they don’t deserve to either” and “struggle builds character and makes you a better writer”, hold much water since they’re both ableist and deeply flawed from a societal perspective.

Oh, and before you try to tell me that struggling would make me a better person, I have struggled. I am a rape survivor, I escaped an abusive marriage, I have worked and fought hard for the life I currently have. And I am damned certain none of it has made me a better person. It almost broke me. It hurt. And yet I try to be kind, I try to care, I try to offer support and stand with those who need my help despite what I have been through, not because of it. I didn’t need struggle to learn how to be a caring person but that struggle has made me desperate to make sure other people don’t have to experience such things because it was hell.

And if you were actually anywhere near as good a writer as you seem to think you are you’d know the “if you haven’t experienced it you can’t write about it accurately” claim is bullshit. That’s what research and a good imagination is for. Or do you think @neil-gaiman has, for example, actually been to heaven and hell and had conversations with celestial beings and deities and that’s how he can effortlessly transport us to such places and situations with his words.

That said I suppose experience does have its place. After all my calling your stance vindictive and bitter isn’t projection on my part, rather it’s coming directly from my own experiences of others who have espoused similar views.

You looked at the world, went “I had to struggle so everyone else must also struggle” instead of “I had to struggle so I must try to make sure no one else does”, and then you didn’t even have the self awareness to keep your vindictive bitterness to yourself. Surely someone with such a high IQ can see how awful that makes you.

So you think struggling is a bad thing? Why? I always thoroughly enjoyed the struggle. I still do. It's what life is all about. Also tends to be what stories are all about. Every country in the world has its own creation myth: the European countries decolonising from the yoke of the Roman Empire, the Americas and Africa and India decolonising from the European empires etc. Ancient empires had their own creation myths and 21st Century people have their own stories of "How I Came to Be". Everyone talks about their creation story. People either had good parents and a bad school or the other way around. Or an illness, or bullies in the school lunch room, or poverty, or fighting in a war. It's the stuff of all stories. How we all came to be. The struggles which made us who we are. Personally I always got a tremendous enjoyment out of braving the elements, defying expectations, beating the odds, getting things done under arduous conditions. Several people on here, yourself included, have decided or assumed that a hard life is a bad life or something to be avoided. But, au contraire, It's the struggle which makes character and the character which ends up with the joy of self discovery. If you don't have struggle and difficulty your stories will lack authenticity. If you've never carried a weight which too heavy for you and hurt yourself in process you will not be able to write convincingly of the feelings and physical sensations of some post-modern Sisyphus. If you have never lived for weeks on wild blackberries or beans on toast or leftovers then your description of that in a novel or short story will not ring true.

What are you going to do? Hope the actor or director has had a hard life and knows how to play the role in spite of the unrealistic script?

You've got to live life to write about life. You can't make a career out of writing about characters to whom nothing difficult ever happened.

I respect my long time friend Alby Stone who lives in South London who is retired and writes novels. He wrote a great book called "A Deeper Darkness" which takes place mostly in Siberia. I enjoyed that book and I respect him especially because I know that he went to Siberia and is describing a place he knows. He also travelled on the Orient Express.

When I write I write about experiences I have had. Things I know. Things which were hard and needed to be worked through. Grasping the bull, taking the nettle by the horns, mixing the what he metaphor.

The "vindictive bitterness" you mention doesn't live anywhere within me. That's probably "projection" as Carl Jung called it.

[glarawelmagolben]

My body has a habit of reacting the opposite way to the norm to drugs, legal or otherwise. Weed was no exception. The first time I tried it I had a panic attack that almost hospitalised me, the second time I kicked a door down. There will not be a third time, for obvious reasons.

weed is a problem I’ll think “wow that sounds terrible” when someone describes something they like to me and then I’ll say “wow that sounds terrible” I’M SORRY I DIDN’T MEAN TO SAY THAT ALOUD