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Here's the whole short film. I remember watching this years ago and man, it hit about the same in 2016.

A big part of this film is to remember how fascists will try to divide and other you, split everyone into smaller, easier to defeat groups. They'll pick minorities to drive out or assimilate, and that will weaken the whole of the country, so they can find another bite to take.

The fact that this is 80 fucking years ago but still just as relevant is terrifying.

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It's way too late and I don't have the time nor brain to make an actual witchy comment on this, but I approve of everything going on in these tags. Sometimes you just need to introduce a spirit to a problem and be like "we'll give you stuff if you help us out with this" and sometimes the spirits like "cool, I like bones".

energy policy would be much better if we still had a tradition of animal sacrifice I think. people would be way more chill about nuclear energy if they could see a large and proud bull being ritually sacrificed every month or so at the base of the cooling towers to keep the plant safe

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"Time is money" goes both ways, and for me that's what DIY fashion is all about. I wouldn't splurge batshit amounts of money for flashy big brand fast fashion even if I had the funds for it, but as I set my own work schedules, I'm occasionally free to take two days off from work to use 4 euros' worth of thrift shop materials to turn my own old shoes into something that Killstar would sell for 115€.

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Apparently this one fuckin works, and who am I to argue with the collective agreement of tumblr. Will report back if good things happen.

good things will happen 🧿

things that are meant to be will fall into place 🧿

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Personally my catch all term for getting rid of an unwanted spirit is "Banishing" but a lot of these terms are more specific to ways to do something. I've got a list of loose definitions! Cleansing - Cleaning an area of spiritual influence, energy, and/or literal spirits. Often uses a material like smoke, water, or even mundane cleaning supplies, but can be done ritualistically or symbolically as well.

Warding - The act of creating areas that spirits cannot enter or influence. This can be in the form of spiritual barriers, areas of influence around a spell, or physical thresholds. This is more preventative that actively removing a spirit, although with some creative thinking you could lock a spirit away with wards.

Protecting - Similar to wards, but most often used in the context of personal protection. This is usually something you do or carry to affect your immediate area, close by target or your own person. Repeating a chant, wearing an amulet, performing a ritual are all protecting.

Cord Cutting - Severing the connections you might have with a spirit or taglock a spirit may use to connect to you. This is also preventative most of the time, as it prevents the spirit from finding or following you in the first place.

Healing - In the context of removing spirits, you can use spiritual healing magic to heal an area or person being troubled by a spirit in attempts to make that place or thing less hospitable or attractive to the spirit, and thus driving it away.

Conjuring - This is more the act of bringing a spirit to you, than it is repelling them. Though again, with some creative thinking you could do things like conjure a spirit away from where you are, in order to make it lost or simply put it outside of your wards.

Binding - Setting limitations on something. In a literal sense, you can bind a spirit to a location like you would tie someone up with a rope. Symbolically you could bind a spirits actions, disallowing it from coming near you, harming you, or really anything you can think of. Binding is also used on non-spirits as a blanket term of setting limitations.

Road opening isn't something I know anything about, so I'm leaving that out.

Everything I've defined here is only loosely defined, even in my own practice. If you know me, I'm big on out of the box thinking and terms are usually only good at conveying a surface idea.

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I feel like your average local facebook witch wants one of two things, and just have no idea how to express it.

One of those things is a library meetup. And it'll do them a world of good and they can start to figure there shit out from there.

The other thing is The Craft (1996). And let's be real, we all kinda want that in some small way, but seeking it out on facebook is a great way to fast forward to the end of that movie where they're all super toxic, insane, and trying to kill/curse each other.

So many people in local facebook witch groups starting a coven or wanting to join a coven with absolutely no information on what they are looking for, are interested in, or if they currently have a practice. The idea that you just randomly throw out there sometimes like that is fucking wild to me. It's so disjointed.

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Don't be afraid to ask your local organizers if there's anything specific they need or if there's a shortage of something specific they're hoping someone will donate. It might turn out you could be that someone, or know who has what they need.

Since the holiday toy drive post is circulating again, I figured this would also be helpful! Food insecurity is such a massive problem in America, in general, and if you have the means to help feed others, I think you should take that opportunity. Here are some other tips:

1. If you’re planning on donating items from your own pantry, please check the expiration dates on the packaging. Think of your donations as gifts to bestow, not castoffs to be rid of. It’s awful to think of people feeling like they got scraps someone else just didn’t want. Everyone deserves dignity with their meals.

2. If you’d rather give money to a food bank, that’s also great since they buy food in bulk and know what items are most wanted/needed!

3. Not everyone has access to appliances like stoves or microwaves or hot plates so if you can donate items that don’t need to be heated up, that would also be greatly appreciated!

🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽

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Tack on "and that fucker isn't as 'one, only, and true' as he'd have you think. There's probably dozens, possibly hundreds of those bastards. And more than half of them are drunk most of the time." then yeah, I'm right there with you.

Is it religious is your view is basically, "yeah, I reckon there's a god, but I do not respect or worship him, and furthermore I think he is wildly overrated"?

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If you need more of a reason to go to your library, they have all kinds of stuff. Like, you would be amazed the kind of stuff your library or the library a town over might offer.

My library has a library of things. You can barrow power tools, a button maker, soil and water tests, musical instruments, a metal detector, board games, kitchen appliances, I could go on, and I mean that because their website has 12 pages of stuff.

On top of that, they often have tons of classes on how to use all that stuff, or at least can get you in contact with the people who can teach you how to use it all.

Libraries are amazing for so many reasons.

Ok, I've seen this sentiment before, but the amount of Kindle Unlimited ads I've been seeing is forcing me to repeat it-

Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.

Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.

Use your library. They want so badly to give you all of the things for free.

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As someone who specialized in making physical trinkets and charms, I gotta say this is a solid explanation of some really good approaches. And I'll second, in my experience, simply charging something without framework like enchanting or some kind of underpinned spell work on the object tends to wear off really quickly. Even some fairly simple enchantment can really improve the longevity and effectiveness of a spell placed on or in an object.

i apologize for the silly question but how can you protect an already created item or make it protective? i don't know why it's not really computing in my head

If you can't/don't want to modify the item at all, some ideas:

Consecrate it. Through a consecration, rebirth, or baptism ritual, kill the object's old fate (let's say, as a class ring), and then give it new life as a protective object.

The physical body stays the same but you have changed its fate and its life; you've made it into something else.

This consecration should focus specifically around protection. So you are consecrating it to the purpose of protection; you are changing its fate to one of being a protector; you are rebirthing it into a life of protecting.

Another option is to consecrate it unto a protective god or spirit. Suppose you get along quite famously with the protection work that Mars (planet) does. You can consecrate the ring to be a Talisman of Mars, a Martial Shield, a Protection Amulet of the Red Planet.

The function of consecration in this context is to set a very rock-solid ""mental"" body within the physical object. (I believe it goes beyond that; I believe you're literally fucking around with fate, which is a good thing.)

Enchant it. I think at this time I would not consider consecration to be the same as enchantment. We can take a class ring and give it a new life as a protector.

But the enchantment is like outfitting the protector with weapons, armor, and a warhorse.

So just consecrating something on its own I think does something, but maybe nothing spectacular.

To do an enchantment, find powers or correspondences which do the same kinds of things you want the protection amulet to do. Maybe we want clove for space, basil for bravery and strength, and oak for a mighty defense.

During the casting of the spell, you might empower/charge/evoke power into the plants, and then direct that power to infuse into the class ring.

"Oak, you build an infinite wall that goes in every direction. None can pass you. And this power does not remain in this oak twig, but it goes into the ring. And within and around the ring, the wall is raised." That sort of thing.

Charge it. You can take a lot of protective energy, program it to do the kind of defense you want, and pour it directly into the ring. IME if you only do this, and you don't do enchantment/energy work to actually build a secure energy structure within the ring, the charge will fade quickly.

You could do just 1 or 2 of these things. You don't have to consecrate a ring to be a protector before you enchant it to protect.

But I believe it's like this:

Imagine a king (you) needs a knight. You could choose a random civilian off of the street and say, "you're a knight now!" and give them a horse and sword. This is like enchanting without consecration.

But you could also consult the oracle and find a person fated and foretold to be the most powerful protector in all the land. The key is, you're not only the king who can knight; you're also the god who assigns fate. This is like consecrating before enchanting/charging.

Finally, you can go down to the pub and say, "look. Free rounds all night to whoever goes and beats up the guy down the road." It'll cost a bit up front and your protector won't be around for long, but it'll work. This is like charging without enchanting or consecrating (or building energy structures, etc).

Overall I believe the most powerful artifacts are born under special stars (minding astrological timing when you create the vessel), consecrated to fate, enchanted with purpose, and charged with power. But you can skip any of these steps and only do the ones you can manage. It will work anyway, it just influences how long the magic will last, and the magnitude of the effects.

(Also btw this was not a silly question at all)

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Going to throw this out into the aether:

If you're asking for help and you set clear boundaries about what magical actions you don't want to take, people who may be able to help might have to ask "why" before they can help.

This is probably not because they are getting ready to tear down your boundaries and try to force you to do magic you don't want to do.

I hazard this is because they probably need context to adapt their knowledge to your specialized needs.

Say you post, "can anyone provide a prosperity spell for a job? But I don't want to talk to spirits so please don't recommend that kind of magic."

A person asking you why you don't want to talk to spirits is not posing a rude or irrelevant question.

Do you not want to talk to spirits because you're under the impression that is the only reason why spells would include talking aloud, and you do not want to speak out loud during spells?

Do you not want to talk to spirits because they make you feel unsafe, and you don't want a spell that acknowledges them at all, even if you don't talk to them?

If you don't want to give details behind why you're seeking certain kinds of information, of course, don't share it.

But I think it's useful to consider that people can ask "why" not because they don't respect you, but rather because they are trying to understand your needs in order to help you more.

(I'm not saying assholes who don't care about boundaries don't exist. I have been in many cesspools where inexperienced or narrowminded practitioners simply do not understand why someone would have different boundaries than they do. My point is just, there are valid reasons to ask "why.")

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Spite Stew

So I was teaching my partner some basics about magic and spellcraft. She’s been getting more and more serious about it in the past year, and the conversation ended up coming around to kitchen witchery. She tends to think of kitchen witches as the sweet cooks who will pour you some tea and chat while making a meal. And while that’s a pretty apt description of most kitchen witches I know, I explained that they’re not limited to cheery and helpful magic. While talking about this I remembered a kitchen curse I read years and years ago, probably early 2000s. It was called something like spite stew, or spite soup, or maybe spite gumbo. I couldn’t find it anywhere online, but I can recall most of the spell, so I thought I’d jot it down and share.

This is a specially prepared curse to send general ill will, bad luck, and negative energy at a single target or related group of targets. You can fine tune the ingredients for the desired effect.

For this spell you’ll want the lowest quality ingredients you can scrape together. Nothing purely inedible, but only what you’d serve your worst enemy. While preparing the meal, you’ll want to think of the wrongs this target has done, and what you’d like to happen to them. The idea is you’ll make a meal filled with negative intent and symbolically feed it to your target.

Pour water into a large pot, bring to a gentle boil and add;

A very bony cut of fish, adding extra bones is an option

A green potato, cut into 8ths (it should be noted that green potatoes can be mildly poisonous and can be dangerous in high amounts or if given to children or those of poor health.)

The toughest stems vegetables that you have

Onion skins and roots

Any offal you may have or any nasty scraps you have from other cooking

Several handfuls of salt

Too much spice

Too much oil

The hottest peppers you have

Let simmer until the vegetables are slightly under cooked.

Now it’s time to serve your curse. You can either dig a shallow hole outside, or if that’s not a possibility, a sink with a garbage disposal could also work (worst case, a trashcan with cat litter to soak up the liquid). Envision your target, place a picture of them in the hole if you have one, and think hard on all the bad you want to come to them. Simply say “This meal is for you” and dump the contents entirely into the hole. For prolonged effects, you can serve it to them one bowl at a time over several days, until it starts to go off or you run out. This might also be better if you have to use a trashcan.

And there you have it. I don’t think I forgot anything major with this spell. I don’t even remember where I originally read this one. I remember I was in middle school, so early 2000s. It might have even been, like, an old angelfire website, or a geocities, or maybe even one of the yahoo groups I used to be in way back in the day. If anyone’s seen a different version of this curse or wants to add to it, feel free.

Disclaimer: Personally, I’m not into cursing, but it’s not my business to tell other people not to either. If you want to use this, by all means, go for it. I’m mostly posting this for conversation sake and the academic reasoning of keeping a record of this as if flies through my memory, and I fail to think of it again for another 15 to 20 years. Also I think it’d be cool if anyone else knows about this or other versions of it.

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Might be a relevant post in the coming months, if not years.

I am dying for tiktok witches to give me all the details on the governments secret coven of spellcasters employed to make sure that white people burning fruit can’t hurt any politicians with their psychic beams

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some of your witchcraft posts from years ago shifted my entire view of how witchcraft works and opened my eyes to so many possibilities btw. youve changed my entire practice for the better 🫶🫶🫶

Oh wow, that's awesome to hear!

I know I can have some pretty out of the box concepts, even if they're technically not much of a stretch if you think about them, they just aren't traditionally what people think of. And I often get the feeling I'm just talking into the void, and I know some people actively dislike my posts because they're not in line with the normal thinking of "mainstream witchcraft". I'm really glad someone found it interesting, useful, or thought provoking, let alone to make such a change.

Thanks for letting me know I did some good for you, anon. That brightened up my day a lot 💜

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I unironically like the idea of this. Also kinda relevant to the bread spirit post from the other day.

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So back to bread for a moment. Are we just accepting that bleach doesn't have a spirit of it's own? Because I think bleach 100% has a spirit.

To me, bleach is like fire, capable of destruction and creation. The spirit of white bread is different than that of whole wheat, and I know you know what I'm saying. That's the influence of the bleach's spirit, just like the bread is touched by fire's to become bread.

I was trying to explain the concept of animism to a coworker today (this came up because she names her cars, so the ensuing conversation is technically @upthewitchypunx's fault), and another "witchy" coworker interrupted to say "except for white bread."

"What?"

"White bread doesn't have a spirit. It's too processed by humans."

"Lots of things are processed by humans. I don't really believe that matters."

"It's the bleaching process. The chemicals."

"Okay... I think we're just operating under different systems of belief."

"It's in like every kitchen witch book I've read."

"Okay but the vast majority of witch books are horseshit. And the good ones also have some horseshit. It's a requirement."

"Yeah, I mean it's all just stuff people made up. You have to figure out your own beliefs."

"Exactly. My belief system doesn't include anything about white bread being excluded from animism."

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I'd be down to make some cards. I've painted a few before for my own person unfinished deck. My partner, Silver (aka @silverphoenix103/@doodlebirds) has made a bunch of cards for her WIP decks and actually done playing/trading cards for some clients in the past. She says she'd be down to draw a card or two.

Also I would love to actually buy these, but I've got no money atm. But a decent idea for selling them might be https://www.thegamecrafter.com/

I've used them for prototyping games and making business cards for Silver and I. They're good quality, 100% customizable, not too expensive, prints on demand with no minimum order size, and they have card size options in everything from half business card size to poker to tarot. They also have the options for booster packs with random cards. I recommend them to anyone who wants to try making a card or board game.

Hello all!

I'm just putting out feelers to see who would be interested in a project like this. Essentially, we'd be making artist's trading cards, but made for the purpose of divination/sending them to each other to potentially use in a DIY divination deck. If there's enough interest, I'll put out a form sometime later this week for folks to fill out to get it rolling.

Thanks a ton!

(tagging @friend-crow so they for sure see this :) )