#animists

[musingmelsuinesmelancholy]

Some things I’ve been thinking about. At times being an American trad witch is incredibly frustrating and at others it’s absolutely exhilarating, rewarding. Reconnecting with my ancestral ( primarily french and scottish ) lore, magical practices, witchcraft etc has and will continue to inform my practice but I’ll never be a “french” witch. I’ll never be a “scottish” witch. I can find a lone hawthorn or a sacred tree guarding a hidden spring to tie the cloutie to, I can divine via a snail’s mucus trail, Fly to the Sabbath to meet The Abbess, heed the Dame Blanches, pluck the golden bloom with songs to St Columba, safeguard me and mine via silver, spring water and juniper. Yet there’s many things I’ll never know or be able to do. Whether that’s because these things are so tied to the land or a specific place, language barriers, ( working to overcome this one ) or due to the ( well warranted) gate keeping of lore and practices.

This used to be a source of great confusion for me. I think because I was afraid( due to my previous new age fuckwittery ) to experiment, do anything other than what I understood as “traditional”. My understanding being too rigid at the time; the pendulum swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. This delayed my progress and “froze” me. I was left wondering what an “American” trad craft would look like; most our books do come from a European POV. Learning of our own magical traditions as well as those of my Canadian family ( still working on that one haha ) helped. Reading Robin Kimmere helped. Reading Schulke, him being an American and writing on American plants, helped too. I’ve come to know Sugar Maple and Plantain as powerful spirits. Both teaching important lessons on how to rectify my ancestors mistakes, to foster relations with the First Peoples and how to incorporate the magic of this land into my craft. Rather than being frustrated by my being American I see it as a challenge now. I get to explore spirits, plants, places, animals, spiritual/physical ecologies ( is even really a difference between these?) completely unknown to my ancestors. I get to reconcile the old and the new. To learn from Spirit Direct. Tradition isn’t the worship of ashes, it’s the preservation of Fire. New wood must be added to keep The Fire burning. The Devil of this land certainly is a spirit of the unknown.

I am the land, the land is me.

I don’t own it, to it I owe all.

To it my body will return, the tithe paid.

I’m not rolling hills of heather, white chalk cliffs, the monk’s island nor the azure coast. The memories of these places echo distantly in my blood, sung alive by my ancestors shades. Part of me they’ll always be; yet it’s not who I am. Not what I am.

I’m craggy shores, dull-jade waves bearing down upon the tired rocks. I am musky pine forests veiled in mist. Sun-venerating oaks hugging the shoreline. Bleeding alders in damp ground swelling. Proud maples sustaining generation upon generation with their boiled blood. Death-grey clay, exposed by running spring.

I am the kudzu, the itching moth, the knotweed, the Norway maple, the ivy wrecking havoc upon the land. My surname and light skin proof of a genocide ongoing. I am my ancestors sins; the specter of the Old Growth forests, their grief hanging over the land like a fog. Every interaction with The Land tinged with sadness, loss.

I am my maternal side’s copper curls. Melusine’s pride. Ave Landry! Ave Gauthier! Forebears mine.

I am my paternal side’s grief. The end result of decades of cultural warfare. The Jesuits stole our name….my hair will not be cut.

Never will I libate these glacier carved valleys with booze.

I am the plantain, learning a kinder way. The sumac reclaiming the orchard.

My Februarys, my Marches aren’t snow drops and daffodils peaking through the frozen ground. They’re steely skies and walls of sleet. Bloodroot heralds winters wane; not Brigid’s flower.

My June isn’t fields of poppies, it’s seas of crimson staghorn blooms skyward reaching.

My augusts aren’t golden shafts of wheat, swaying in summer’s last breaths; they’re explosions of neon-violet and honey-yellow. Corn ripening on the vine, supporting the climbing bean. The cicadas song reverberating.

Old Michaelmas marks harvest’s end, October potatoes long buried in soils darkness finally exhumed. The Devil his Rosy Briar to ascend and plunge.

With Novembers first snows the Dead come in.

I’ll never process around a standing stone nor know what it is to live and eat off the land my dead lay in. Finally, I’m learning to be at peace with this. To love and know the land I live on. I’ll always be a stranger here, a guest. I hope to be a good one.

[upthewitchypunx]

PNW Folkloric Magic Collective Open Meeting - Sunday January 14th 3 PM FREE!

Belmont Library- 1038 SE Cesar Estrada Chavez Blvd, Portland, OR

PNW Folkloric Magic Collective is an esoteric study/social group focused on animist and folkloric based magical systems. We've been meeting for a year, and it's a new year, let's start again!

Each meeting has a theme. The theme for this meeting is you magical plans for this year, come prepared to participate in the discussion.

*While this event is open to the public, we aim to create and anti-racist and anti-fascist space for conversation and connection.

**Masks are strongly encouraged!

[389]

West Nepal, Humla Animistic Mask wood, kaolin 9.75 x 7 x 4 inches 24.8 x 17.8 x 10.2 cm M 93

[sarenth]

Face Ragnarök Like Fenrir

At times like these I also take inspiration from Fenrir.

They put their hand in your mouth, bite it off.

They tie you up, break those fetters.

They may finally tie you down and put a sword in your mouth. What will fall out of your mouth is hope.

They cannot contain you.

Your fetters will break. You will be free. Vengeance will be yours.

Hail Fenrir.

Ves þú heil!

[a-single-white-crow]

When I was young I knew the trees had souls, each plant felt different, and every animal held a lesson to teach.

When did I forget this? How did I grow up and lose touch with this understanding?

Now I'm back, relearning the lessons I was already taught when I was young.

[spider-artdump]

[spiralhouseshop]

More stuff back in stock!

Sigil Magic: Fir Writer, Artists, and other Creatives by T. Thorne Coyle

A Witch's Guide to Spellcraft by Althea Sebastiani

Folk Witchcraft: A guide to Lore, Land, and The Familiar Spirit for the Solitary Practitioner by Roger J Horne

Memento Mori: A Collection of Magickal and Mythological Perspectives on Death, Dying, Mortality & Beyond

Sigil Magic: Fir Writer, Artists, and other Creatives by T. Thorne Coyle

A Witch's Guide to Spellcraft by Althea Sebastiani

Folk Witchcraft: A guide to Lore, Land, and The Familiar Spirit for the Solitary Practitioner by Roger J Horne

Memento Mori: A Collection of Magickal and Mythological Perspectives on Death, Dying, Mortality & Beyond

Magical House Protection: The Archeology of Counter-Witchcraft by Brian Hoggard

Weird Walk Zines and the new Weird Walk books!

By Rust of Nail and Prick of Thorn-The Theory and Practice of Effective Home Warding by Althea Sebastiani

Curses, Hexes, & Crossings: A Magician's Guide to Execration Magic by S Connolly

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape by Jeremy Harte

Magic: A History Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

Pagan Book of the Dead by Claude: Ancestral Visions of the Afterlife and Other Worlds by Claude Lacouteux

[mrsoharaa]

Shoko asks if you and Suguru are dating, hence almost being around each other and always seem to hang out beyond Jujutsu Tech. And as you were about to reply to Shoko’s question, from the glimpse of the corner of your eye, you can see Suguru “talking” with his students, timely blinking slowly up at you, starring directly at you patiently waiting for your answer. Curiosity immensely pooling in his lingering eyes, wearing nothing short but a slant of a playful grin.

Butterflies immediately swarming wildly in the pit of your stomach and your breaths hitching at the ridge of your rib cage.

[pushing500]

A baby thrumbo!!!!! It’s so small???? I’ve never seen one in the game! I love him so much! Look at him!!!

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[meirimerens]

Sorry if this question is a bit forward or too personal or if this isn't the place to ask. But what goddess do your worship?

her name is mother she looks like this

[enchanted-wildflower]

On animism

One of my teachers at university told us something today, that I believe to be relevant to animism and therefore also witchcraft:

He explained that in the West we see everything as occurences, whereas in some languages the same happenings are described as actions. Meaning that in the West we tend to imply that there is no agency involved in whatever happens, while some other languages tend to imply that someone activily causes things. His example was that in the West rain is understood as something that just happens, no one causes the rain. Whereas in Mesoamerica it was believed that it rained because some god was crying.

While the idea of a literal crying god causing it to rain on earth might be outdated, I find it really interesting how these two perspectives - events vs. actions - might shape our relationship with the world. If rain is not just an occurence, but someone acting with agency, rain becomes another part of the community we live in. The community then doesn't only consist of humans anymore, but of everything that surrounds us. Suddenly there are all these new players that actively affect your life with their actions. Other-than-human persons that you can interact with and with whom you have to keep a friendly relationship. If the tree in front of your house isn't just an object, but a being with agency, you actually have to be at least respectful and might even want to build a relationship with them, get to know them, learn from them.

I think that's really the core of animism. Descriptions of animism are often reduced to the believe that everything has a soul, but I think believe doesn't even factor into it. You don't need to believe that there is a non-physical aspect to rain, mountains, stones. It's about how we interact with them. I don't even have to ask myself the question if the tree in front of my house has a soul in order to learn about and from them or to interact with them. In my opinion animism is something that is done, not thought or believed. It's a perspective.

Listening to my teacher also reminded me of the following part of Braiding Sweetgrass (great book btw) which explains all this really well:

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa - to be a bay - releases the water from bondage and lets it live. "To be a bay" holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the lan- guage I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

[...]

This is the grammar of animacy. [...] In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.

To whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy? Naturally, plants and animals are animate, but as I learn, I am discovering that the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of attributes of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people.

[...]

The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013), p. 78-80.

[musingmelsuinesmelancholy]

Reddening a moose bone ring to aid in facilitating congress with The Land. As far as I’m aware moose aren’t especially sacred to the tribes here nor could I find any stories where they played a significant role. Tho please do correct me if I’m wrong!

EDIT: there’s a rather funny folk story here regarding “Specter Moose”. Couldn’t help but think of it during the process haha.

[upthewitchypunx]

Looking for a place for animist witches of all varieties from the atheist to the polytheist? My buddy just started this discord for that. Anyone can be an animist, it's a worldview and a thoughtful way to be in relation to the things around you.

[lunegrimm]

"The witches giving birth to summer"

Personal piece from earlier this year, Summer is already drawing to a close so decided to quickly post it now before autumn is in full swing :)

[sarenth]

Face Ragnarök Like Óðinn

At times like these I take inspiration from Óðinn at Ragnarök:

Look it in the eye, face it directly, resist it with all you have and do whatever you are able.

Ves þú heil.

[allhailklisz]

has this been done yet