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Check out my picnic basket turned witch’s basket!

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Asa Smith. Celestial Illustrations from Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy. 1851.

Contd from here

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meaning

Do words mean things, or things mean words? Can aught exist without a name? Do sound or sign make real life real? Are something and its word the same? I want to see a wordless sight, To hear a sound that can’t be signed – What greater meaning can there be Than meaningfulness undefined –

– an-earth-witch

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Jar Substitutions

Before you do a jar spell, it’s a good idea to ask yourself where that jar will spend it’s life. Is it going to be buried immediately? Will it hang out in your closet for a few years? Will you keep it on your dresser to shake and re-energize every now and again?

Why is it important to think about? Eco-friendliness, my pals. Glass isn’t exactly what you’d call biodegradable. Many witches are replacing jars with more sustainable, eco-friendly options. 

Is the spell going to be buried, left outside, tossed in a river, left at a crossroads, etc.? Leaves, flowers, coffee filters, anything made from wool or cotton, tea bags, peat pots, egg shells, natural clay, long grass woven into baskets, and so many more biodegradable options are available to replace the standard glass or plastic jar. 

Can the spell eventually be disassembled? Cool, you have my permission to use glass or plastic, but consider using one from the thrift store or one you already have! Peanut butter jars, tomato sauce jars, etc. That way you’re not condemning another jar to its eventual landfill destination. When you’re done with it, take it apart and recycle the jar. 

The spell can’t be disassembled? Go to Michael’s(or equivalent craft store) and go to the wood aisle. There, you will find small jewelry boxes made of either wood or cardboard. Many will have metal closures, and you can seal them with wax if you need to. They will biodegrade significantly faster than glass or plastic. 

I know, glass jars are pretty, and contribute to the aesthetic of witchcraft. By all means, use glass jars to hold your herbs, to store your moon water, for anything that’s temporary. Because you can recycle those. But spells are a commitment, often we don’t want to take them apart once they’re put together. So it’s our job to consider how our practice effects our planet. 

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Bonus Chumbley thoughts: One thing I've been turning over in my head is, a lot of my interlocutors the other month jumped straight to the importance of supporting artists - as if his books were most similar to a Greyson Perry vase or a limited edition poet. I think, in part, all that shit felt so dissonant to me is: I don't see his books as art. I see them as knowledge. More similar to a book of recipes or a manual for driving a car. Now clearly, odd indie witch authors kinda straddle a line between the two; they can be understood in both categories. But books by Mr C are definitely seen as *art objects*, hence attitudes like "it's perfectly reasonable to charge whatever he sees fit for them", "it's right that these rare collectables should be expensive on the secondary market" and "don't complain because you can't afford luxury items". For me, I'm interested in his ideas, for me the issue is access to knowledge: "Don't complain because you can't afford factual information, only people with disposable income should be able to explore new ideas". Well, teachers and academics should also be paid for their work, but I'm very confident that knowledge should be as open as reasonably possible. I don't think knowledge should be a luxury item. I absolutely think one has a right to it. When one does not have a right, I don't think that barrier should ever be "ability to generate income". (I've had this experience with Cochrane in the past where, the only good source of information on his work and ideas was an out of print book which has gained collectable status; and I was very disappointed on acquiring it. It's definitely soured me for "there isn't any information about their tradition online but you should totally buy this book because it's good". It's impossible to assess an author without access; access should be set as low as possible, especially when the original creator is no longer profiting from it. Cochrane wasn't my jam, and getting that book was a gamble that did not pay off (he may have been a forebear of tradcraft approaches, but he still used one god, one goddess, and ran a hierarchical coven, which is to say he did not have the hallmarks of modern tradcraft which are most important to me - he still feels like a flavour of Wicca, rather than a wholly new strand)) Ways to combat this? I'm not sure, but I definitely think creators doing something novel should share parts of what they are doing online and openly, just to give one a basic sense of what their approach is; and I think it should be open season after death.

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ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this.  you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.

humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.  

i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy. 

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Meta-insecurity when my posts about insecurity in witchcraft are less popular than other people's posts about insecurity in witchcraft :p

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So I'm still - still! - having panic attacks and self harm incidents courtesy of being harassed by the tradcraft mean girls last month, and it's bumming me out. (Don't send unprovoked insults and attacks to strangers; you don't know what they are going through or how it will affect them.) It's feeding into a lot of thinking I'm doing at the moment about the broken promise of the internet. How it does do all this cool stuff like link me with ideas and strangers and make me feel a part of global communities and invested in all sorts of people doing odd stuff. And yet also, it's always at the risk of assholes showing up and shredding you, and there's nothing you can do to prevent that. I think pagan tumblr has an especially bad crowd, but just in this last month I've put up with the same bullshit from like - my ferret forum. My origami forum. My artist trading card community. None of these are me picking fights with people, they're just people deciding that it's fun to stir shit with strangers on the basis of a 100 word post. The last time this happened badly, I had been out of the crisis ward for 2 days - so I messaged the person to say look, this isn't on, I don't want this kind of interaction online and they said "sorry im just tired" as if I wasn't still vomiting every time I consumed liquid. Part of the frustration for me is, for abuse related reasons, I know how badly this stuff fucks me up and have spent the last few years trying to change my relationship with the web to minimise it - I've unfollowed everyone who does it, stepped back from political blogs and conversations which tend to invite this kind of assholery, unfollow or block people instead of disagreeing with them, ghost-blocked a tonne of irl friends who behave like this online, and dumped anyone whose behavior extends to this in person. But no one can really stop drive-by hostility coming to find you. I'm thinking a lot about the Internet As Abuser. Bear with me. I find it hard to differentiate between voices on the internet, as I think most people do. You're not interacting with faces, just with text. I open my inbox and I don't know if I'm going to find supportive and kind messages from strangers, or strangers screaming in my face and telling me to die. Funnily enough, I'm frightened of reading my notes. Have been for years now. It's a pervasive sense of unsafety. It's the same person being unpredictably a source of comfort and a source of terror. It's not being able to defend yourself against it in any meaningful sense. Most of the people I chat to on tumblr are cool people who are lowkey my friends and who I've learnt a lot from. And three three or four times a year You know, it's just so normal. I've actually got a bit in my about where I say "please don't send me hate mail", but obvs no one takes the time to read that. It's normal to treat strangers like this and, if you're a really cool witch, it also boosts your "no one fucks with me" cred and nets you followers. Boy do I love being used as a box others use to clamber on top of. It's also mirroring problems I'm having in real life. Like, I'm afraid to leave the house or go anywhere or talk to anyone because I'm afraid of being attacked. So I spend a lot of time socialising on the internet instead where I - I'm too afraid to read my notes or my inbox or interact with anyone because I'm afraid of being attacked. I'm thinking about "creepy bus stop randos" as a comparable model for internet harassment and how to end it. To wit: three or four times a month ill be on a bus and some bloke will decide we are going to have a conversation, deliberately misread my body language, and saying "please go away and leave me alone" only makes things worse. Comparable in the sense that: 1) being in public is not consent to have conversations with you and 2) the onus is on the person starting the conversation to figure out whether their conversationee is into this kind of interaction and, if you're not sure, err on the side of not doing it. and 3) If the person seems to be uncomfortable, back off rather than inviting all your mates to have a go. I can't opt out of strangers getting in my personal space online or irl, and it bothers me a lot. I don't leave the house most days. And online, it causes problem like - far from hating creatives, I'm literally a full time working artist and author reliant on the web for work, except I'm too frightened to answer my work email or even look at it, and to update my brand blog or insta, and interact with people as I'm supposed to; I'm too frightened to work, but one can't opt out of the internet and be an artist these days. So it goes. My attitude is supposed to be "oh just ignore bullies and do your own thing", but like - this is the third time this week I've been alone and had this panic attack and ended up bloody. It's absolutely a Problem, a problem without end. Like, I don't have a good relationship with the web. I know that. It's just unavoidable; people in my life don't take requests like "I need zero access to the internet" seriously, and you need it to do anything nowadays. This is what happened for me in political environments too. For a while it was like - I hate how all the loudest voices here are mean bitches, I'm going to try and model a kinder sort of politics - and now it's just - I don't care about the collective, and if people want to create a mean environment then they deserve it. I just want the world to leave me alone. This is just the latest in a long series of hobbies and communities and environments where you're welcome only so far as you don't step out of line, and you accept people being mean without complaint. I don't want my existence to be series of standing up to bullies, I want people to be kind as a matter of course. I think this is a roundabout way of saying I'd like to start an old school blog and start putting my posts there instead. There's a post on my queue which I don't know is posted yet or not about the internet of my youth, how 90s html website culture and 00s blogger/WordPress culture were slower, quieter and more generous than the speed and the nastiness of interactive social media like tumblr and so forth. Those older blogging forms were shouting into the dark - you rarely got responses or knew who was reading, and as much as I love the interactions I have with friends online and the support I've had from strangers, I actually don't think that is enough compared to the constant, constant, constant terror the dark side of internet comms has for me. (Even livejournal - batshit as that was - had more ability to wall your content and make rules about interaction in your space than here.) It's my birthday today and all I've done is cry, and cut, and hyperventilate because a small power-hungry clutch of internet bullies have worked out that being performatively mean for their followers is a great way to drive traffic to their content and self-validate the power of their craft by having a fan club and picking on people who can't fight back. I can't get the feeling of panic out of my skin; I can't differentiate the voices on the internet enough to feel like 6 billion people on the planet all hate me personally, and that everyone I encounter is just waiting for an excuse to use me or hurt me or get the knives out; I can't face participating in another club or hobby or trying to meet new people because it's just going to be this same thing where everyone is nice until you get targeted by the big kids and have to accept it or leave; this is my 18th year in therapy, and there's nothing promising on the horizon to help me cope with these fears any better. But like, that's just humans for you.

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Sometimes when I find myself feeling less than everyone else, I make a list. I ask, “What is it exactly that’s going to make you feel like you’re just as good of a witch/pagan/diviner/writer/person as whoever it is you’re so jealous of? What do they have that you don’t?”

I try to be specific, and not delve too deeply into my own melodrama.

Usually at least half of those things are completely irrelevant to my life and my practice. Like, yes Jasmine, you could have a better working knowledge of woolly mammoth reproductive cycles, but…why do you need that? What good will it do you? And do you even WANT to understand Thelema, Jay? Really?

So then I let those things go.

Other things are sometimes qualities or skills I already have but I’m downplaying them, either out of insecurity or because they don’t fit into my current narrative of how terrible I am at everything. 

I cross those off the list too.

So whatever is left, I just keep asking myself…would this actually help me? Would this really make me better? Do I want to do this?

If I decided that, yeah, actually, it makes total sense for me to understand the history of magical and medical herbalism, and that would benefit me and my path…then I can actually go pursue that idea. Instead of crying that everyone else but me has already done it and they’re so great and I’m so awful.

And by that point, what I’m doing, I’m doing for me. Not for anyone else. Which feels so much better.

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Multiple witch bloggers I have both loved and admired have just left off blogging and existing online, consciously because it dogged at them in offline hours, they felt conflicted about sharing or existing for consumption, and because the internet culture is vile. Frankly, I can't blame them. But I miss them too. I think often about doing the same, but writing still feels helpful to me, a way of making-real and catching the fluttering thoughts. I write a lot of didactic, instructional pieces and I enjoy that, and on reflection I think it's my poor memory and the way I respond well to having instructions and structure around me. More often than not, I'm going back to these posts I wrote in lucid moments and letting them guide me. But I miss them too. And there's probably an overlap in the sorts of people one admires and the sorts of people with the wisdom to disappear.

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And Re: "we should not pay artists we should dismantle the whole system whereby ones survival is entirely reliant on ones ability to produce things of value" That stems in turn from being hella disabled, not just a political view but a necessary one, a belief that allows me to feel my life has value. I am too unwell to leave my house. I'm in the process of applying for benefit. I have to believe that the world is wrong, and that there are kinder ways to organise our society. I don't know what those are, what would work or be sustainable. I've lost attachment to the idea that people who work should be paid, because its flipside is that people who do not work, who can't work, or who work at things which are not valued, should not be paid, or should not be paid as well or at all, as a sort of cultural punishment. I am increasingly persuaded that simply being born entitles every human to enough to survive; because it that isn't the case, then I am certainly someone who deserves to starve. I produce nothing of value. My partner says he likes having me around, but that's not the sort of contribution to society they pay you for. I draw a lot of self worth from trying to work these things out right now, dreaming of better worlds.

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For Black Friday, I’m releasing the second card in my ongoing Modern Witch tarot deck, you can get free shipping on orders over $40 if you order today!

shop my prints here

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I'd love to hear you write more about the book when you're done :) I have a Gwyn thing since my familiar literally showed up at the door during a rite, but haven't really known what to do with it.

This is a pagan/polytheist post.

I started to read the book Pagan Portals- Gwyn ap Nudd: Wild God of Faery, Guardian of Annwfn, so far it’s an interesting book, besides anything about faeries interest me and I need to know more about Welsh myths and faeries/Gods. I also wonder if the Gwyn ap Nudd is relevant, maybe new mask or something about G, there is always pieces somewhere to find, fun things about devoting time to Gods who choose not to use specific names with people but ask to investigate other identities to teach something.

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Tangential thinking about Chumbley thoughts: When I came up in the 90s and 00s, they hadn't figured out how to monetise the internet yet. Most people has disconnected personal websites, which they maintained for pleasure and rarely had expectations of others reading. Later, this became blogging - something which was still decentralised, where readers were rare and interacting with them uncommon. In my lifetime, those things have gone. Now, central microblogging platforms like tumblr and twitter make connection with readers immediate and interactive - and made "attracting more followers" a goal in a way you really didn't before. I've definitely lost my ability to write happily for an audience of one, content without knowing whether or not i am read. And one is able to monetise what one makes and offer it for sale. Bear with me: I'm sad about this. A sharing culture has vanished. I'm into historic dressmaking, but when you look for tutorials and free patterns online they are all on blogs not updated since 2013. What changed? Where did the people writing incredible free content and sharing their work with the world go? The only people who seem to be maintaining blogs are people running a brand. And I've followed plenty of great blogs which, at some point, have launched a small business - and diminished, either through loss of pleasure or a greater need to be private and middle-of-the-road. Look at Sidney Eileen's website - there is no way anyone would produce a comprehensive free guide to making corsets nowadays. Some of Eileen's most recent posts talks about being ill, so I hope she is still well wherever she is - but where are the next generation like her? The current corsetmakers mostly write for a paywall-locked site. The site does as well as any could: it still offers a lot of free articles, it pays contributors, and I know several of their authors who have reuplodded their work for free on personal blogs with permission after a period of time has elapsed. It's about as open as any site can be while still generating a profit, and I have gratitude for that; but it's still a change from Eileen's generous sharing culture. Something which made all the drama particularly irritating is: I am full time working artist. I am pretty acutely aware of the importance of paying people for work, and have to explain why I cannot lower my prices once or twice a month. And yet - and yet. It's making my grief for the early internet all the more acute. I put 100 hours into a crochet pattern and maybe three people buy it. At that stage, is it really worth me charging anything? People can and do make their own working wages online, and that's great. And yet - and yet. Maybe the culture where i was sharing my patterns for free and downloading them for free from others was better and more optimistic, than one where everyone charges £10 for a pattern and once a year £3.67 minus PayPal fees slinks into my account. Barely anyone is making much more than pocket money, and everyone is disadvantaged. I probably lose more money in a year now paying for patterns than I do by producing them, and so does everyone else. It's definitely causing me a tug of war where, I hate this new norm and I miss the old culture even as it's the only way for me to make rent. And I barely do that. The only place where this sharing culture still exists is the programming community, where it's a core value. You can generally download programming languages and full guides and documentation for free, and people are keen to help. That culture then translates into big tech workplaces who have both the money and the ideology to give employees paid time off to work on personal projects. I love that. Imagine every company gave a months paid leave to everyone each year, imagine the world we could build if underpaid and tired people had those gaps to be creative and explore, or even to spend that month at home with their children or supporting their parents. Changing the culture to recognise the value of this unpaid labour, and then finding a way to support people doing it. I also think a lot about the Universal Basic Income - where the government reinvests the national revenue in giving every citizen a poverty-line yearly wage. I dream about the way this would revive the open culture. I don't need much to survive, and I think a lot about how much happier I was blogging for pleasure and producing content for free than I am now, maintaining a bland blog for my brand and making less back in revenue than I spend buying online content from peers; more aware than ever of the importance of supporting niche artists, but ironically, too broke to do so. If I didn't worry about buying food, if the government took that worry away from me, I'd have the freedom to embody my ideal and share what I make for free. I like youtube's model, where sufficiently large creators get a share of advertising revenue. It enables people to make free content, and be paid for it. I think a lot about how a collectively-owned tumblr, where high traffic posts earned a proportion of ad rev, would work. Or perhaps tumblr's profit could be divided by each user, who could then choose to gift it to bloggers they wished to support. Economically speaking, running a tumblr is working for free: it generates revenue for the site owners. I think patreon is ok, but it still creates too direct a link for me between "producing middle of the road content acceptable to backers on a regular schedule" and "being able to afford gas". And I liked models where things are released for free and for pay simultaneously. I have ordered Dver's books, which republish free blog articles, because I like them. I own Joan Bunning's Tarot book because her website "learn tarot" made the whole book available for free, and I wanted it enough to read it in hardcover. I buy my fave musicians LPs every time, but he still releases them on youtube for free. Perhaps this economy is governed by the same economics of piracy. Studies have shown that people who pirate books and films are people who were never going to buy them anyway; people who would have bought your content still do. For spellbooks, can you even doubt that if creators released them for free online, sufficient people would still want that gorgeous hardback to make a good profit? In short - while I have some specific red flags about religious information being locked behind a paywall, I'm also at a place in my life where I'm thinking a lot about the value of releasing things for free. About that lost culture. About how existing online for profit as a content creator has made my life, the lives of my customers, and the culture of the internet generally - worse. Where I'm turning the idea of "artists should be paid" over and over in my head, and I guess trying to find radical alternatives where people can still support themselves, yet also work for free on things they want to share with the world. I'm not in a place where "more exhange of money for goods and services and survival" sounds like a great ideal to promote. Like most things I blog about, I'm not yet at an answer, and I don't really have a great solution or the power to implement the ideas I do have. And i am up for feedback, though not of the shouty and snarky kind. I just know that when I was a teenager, many people were able to share knowledge and produce outstanding resources online for free, and now they do not. I miss that. It was a better way.

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How Do I Hear The Gods?

"I’m developing a sense and a certainty that there is a third spirit in my system." By this, I mean, you just start knowing. I don't know how I could explain this to someone still starting or seeking, what "hearing the voice of the land" actually feels like and how you do it. Its similar to coming out. If you've come out, even if only to yourself, you'll know that it starts with an inkling, you know before you start knowing consciously and then it's like you've always known, a slow certainty that gets firmer and more strident each time you seek to test it, and eventually ready to name. I'm not sure how you develop this sense though. For me, the key factors have been: 1) going to the woods once a week and having a nice time, learning about the trees, picking litter, practicing the silence and reflection that comes with a good walk 2) learning to make things special: the importance of yes, having a consecrated wand, of keeping sabbats as if the sun won't rise if you don't, and of assuming things which happen to you are acts of the divine rather than coincidence. Unlearning atheism, I guess, and practicing faith. 3) reading more. There's no one book, but having lots of systems to compare and images in your image bank is crucial. If yoy don't like reading, I think doing lots of walks, documentaries, or magic rituals would have a similar effect. When you were a kid and you were up late playing on the computer and then in your dreams you couldn't stop jumping over blocks and shooting bad guys. We are trying to replicate this effect. We are trying to give your subconscious the raw materials to talk with you. 4) practicing and experimenting. Kinda the same as the above point, but it's definitely good to try out one ritual from every tradition you do research on. It won't hurt, and you'll feel the ones which work for you. 5) prayer. Prayer is def underrated in witchy traditions. I've improved a lot since building the habit of talking to the divine during my day - a quick thank you for this, a please for that. Again, filling your world with magic and wonder, creating gaps for the gods to peer through. Now, my first instinct is often to offer prayer in my daily life, and that's the kind of habit change I mean. 6) less internet. Never was there a worse enemy for mindfulness. All my big insights came in a year without it. Trying not to snack on the internet like a packet of pringles, only using it with purpose. 7) immanence. Practice existing in the world. Appreciating the senses. Looking for wonder in what is around you. Practice seeing this world as a magical place. 8) confidence. Remembering that every religious tradition, every magical path was ultimately made up by some bloke with a fantastically out of control ego and an urge to influence others. You, too, can be that bloke. Tear down the idols. It can be useful to the imagination to find a Real Spellbook and tell yourself, this is it, this has the Real Magic in it, the spells that work. All the better to develop that confidence in yourself, to not look for religious authority but to claim it, to damn well use that red carnelian as a water spirit crystal and let the world try and stop you. It takes time to stop wanting proof or better books or leaders, and start imposing your will on reality. Confidence is, when you've got your world quiet enough, and given your mind the crayons and scrap paper to doodle with, deciding that this idea you are having about a star spirit is not an idle fancy or brain fluff, but a Message From The Divine, and being open to believing that. It definitely takes practice. There's not really a shortcut to it because you are re-wiring your habits and thinking. It all sounds so twee when I write it down, but like coming out its not exactly a process you can force. It just sneaks up on you until you can't ignore it. Fake it until you make it.

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Magical thinking is: when you wake up in the dim hours, telling yourself that the Lord of Dawn is calling you to wake, to see his majesty of morning, and rising from your bed - when you want to hide and force yourself back into a dreamless grog, because you can't face another 12 hours of consciousness coming so soon.

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Is there anything less punk than being in a white supremacist punk band. "Yeah here's our next song its all about group conformity and traditional values!"