#elminx rants

[elminx]

The weirdest thing to me about the greater witchcraft community is that (most people, but not everyone) seem to just believe that the older a source is, the more credible it is.

Why?

Someone wrote something 2,000 years ago - in a religious society with which you don't align when everyone kept slaves and women weren't allowed to own property - but it's like totally the only true source of this type of magic that people still practice today?

Why?

I will never get it.

Books are not infallible. People are not infallible. The past is not infallible.

"2,000 years ago, people believed xxxx"

There, I fixed it for you.

That writer didn't have the internet, or antibiotics, or modern medicine, or the scientific knowledge we have today.

Of COURSE their belief systems would be different. That doesn't make theirs wrong or bad, but I question its relevance to our lives.

Like, at all - as anything other than a reference.

[elminx]

I wanted to be clear on something because it has sort of bugged me since I wrote this last night. If you wanna call repeating numbers "Angel Numbers" totes cool - you do you.

But -

I can't handle the idea that any system of communication between us and the Beyond (no matter what you want to call it - angels, gods, spirits, your higher self) would NEVER just include positive meanings.

Because life isn't all good.

If you believe that something Beyond is looking out for you, you should really consider the idea that sometimes they would need to warn you about something. About the 'rona, about getting in the car on that day that you really shouldn't because the weather is really bad, about that dude you met at the bar who is serious bad news...

That's what I, personally, don't like about the idea of "Angel Numbers" as they are represented. They support this love and light cultural moment we are having where everything bad will just go away if you focus on the positive.

At their basis, repeating numbers are just numerology and numerology is a very old practice. You find it in many places - notably in the tarot and in astrology. But those types of numerology aren't all love and light - like for real, do you want to pull the five of ANY suit in a tarot reading?

But if you Google 555 Angel number, you are going to get some nonsense about how a positive change is coming your way. You get nonsense about adventure and free spirits - even some crap about Twin Flames.

Change is change. It can be both good and bad - and generally is both. It contains multitudes - it is one of our true constants in life. But sometimes you have to pulled through the proverbial muck to get anywhere in life because we humans are creatures of habit who don't change unless we're forced to. That is what the 5 represents.

If you go all fluffy bunny on your spirituality, you miss all of the big and important stuff. Beware any source that sells you all good (or all bad).

Hey there, hope you're doing well today!

Do you know anything about Angel Numbers, or repetitive number patterns? Since January i keep seeing repeated numbers, mostly 222, 444 and 555; other numbers less often, repeated three or four times (like 7777 or 333). I see them everywhere around me, consistently everyday, and i also deal with a lot of numbers in my job so it's become ridiculous at this point. It started happening all of a sudden and i have the feeling that they mean something, like someone is trying to tell me something, i just don't know what or who. I have tried to ask in every way i could think of, too, but answers are not clear either. This situation has made me delve into divination and how to develop my psychic abilities, discernment, communication and stuff to try to understand, and i have learned many useful things, but i'm still pretty lost here.

Just wondering if by chance you know what they could mean, if you have any advice or if you could just point the way to any good reading materials about it. Thank you so much!

I am afraid that I am not studied on numerology nor angel numbers. Does anyone on the dashboard have any help?

[elminx]

This is your friendly reminder that no analogy is perfect.

What helps one person to understand and feel connected may not make any sense to you. That is completely okay.

What is not okay is going to them and tearing their analogy apart because it's not For You(TM). Then you are just ruining something important to them, when in truth you are trying to center yourself in their story.

Read that again and then think about how many problems would be solved by just staying in your own lane.

[elminx]

Since I'm ranting about things and its fucking FAT TUESDAY:

I was just looking at a recipe that said to mix flour and milk in a bowl to "create a roux".

What in the fuck of all of the universes?!?

A roux is made with flour and fat and it needs to be cooked until it is AT LEAST golden brown...

Fuck.

Flour and milk? That makes glue, yo.

Rhymes with roux. But definitely not the same thing.

[elminx]

I'm seeing it again: all sorts of pseudo-astrologers talking about how October is gonna be this amazing month of light, love, and positivity!

I'm not gonna lie to you or spice up the truth to make y'all feel better: October is gonna be rough. The transits are rough. Eclipse season is rough. We're still in a global pandemic, the earth is on fire, and hate is on the rise.

Astrologically, we're in a Winter season. What I mean by that is that our slower-moving planets are in rough positions which makes life harder. This happens periodically. But there is no part of it that is magically going to be all love and light - suddenly. Despite everything that's been happening in the world?

If you haven't noticed, humanity is at a turning point. This is reflected in the transits we are experiencing over the course of a number of YEARS! Quite frankly, we are still in the middle of it. All of us, individually and collectively, need to make some serious decisions about our personal futures and the futures of life as we know it.

I'm just being realistic when I say this. The writing is on the wall: it's about extremism, it's about hate, it's about rampant climate change and rising seas.

It's not about doomsday or some crazy "evolution" though either.

It's just life. Some times are hard. You know that times are hard. Unless you've somehow managed to put your head so far up your own ass that all you can smell is your own shit?

I'm tired of the bad predictions. October is not going to just be hugs and puppies. It will be easier for some than others, sure. Sometimes for systemic reasons - aka if you have lots of money or don't have trauma, your life is ALWAYS easier. But it'll also be easier if you've been working on yourself and dealing with your own shit. Because cycles like this put stress on everybody's lives. The more you can shore up your own stuff, the better you can withstand the inundation.

That's just life. And I'll be over here telling you like it is, not just pretending that this shit will go away just because I said October's gonna be some special fucking sunshine month in a sea of darkness.

[elminx]

My general stance on the fact that I will (almost inevitably) make mistakes and have typos in my work:

If whole-ass-published books that had professional editors can fuck up and have typos, then so can I.

You can tell me if you feel like it, but I'm also probably not going to fix it if it's a monthly astrology update.

It's okay for people to make mistakes. It's okay for ME to make mistakes (and you, too).

Signed, The Management

[elminx]

Instead of saying that all witchcraft (quantify THAT lol) is or is not dangerous.

Maybe we need to qualify it as: the type of witchcraft that I know...

or...

The type of witchcraft that I do...

is or is not dangerous.

There. That way everybody can be right. (I'm...sort of sick of this argument. both side doesn't even seem to hear the other)

(but the types of witchcraft that I have encountered definitely CAN BE dangerous, so you know what side of the road I fall on that one)

[elminx]

I want to have a really real moment with all of you magical practitioners out here because something really intense happened to me this past year.

I got put on a form of hormonal birth control (synthetic progestin) to treat a chronic illness and it made me almost completely unable to do magic.

Yeah, I know. The thing that people get flayed alive for saying in witchy spaces because it's seen as anti-medicine. I want you to understand something: I STRONGLY believe in a human's right to control if and when they have a baby. This is not an anti-medicine rant.

But it's also a really important conversation that we need to have for anybody who was born with a uterus or anybody who loves somebody who was born with a uterus: hormonal birth control makes me (and many other humans) severely depressed. It's as if I have never seen a neurotransmitter in all of time and space. Food loses flavor. Touch loses meaning. I become a husk of a human being. (IYKYK)

I love birth control - I think that it is one of the greatest revolutions in medicine that we have ever come up with. But I don't love it for me.

And that's okay. And yeah, I was so fucking depressed that every ounce of my energy had to go into doing the things that kept me alive.

There was rarely spare energy left to do magic.

Obviously, that drug is not for me. And that's the point. People can have bad experiences with drugs - so bad that they can't do anything, really - and that doesn't mean that they are anti-drug if they talk about it. Don't put words in somebody else's mouth (or fingers, as the case may be). We should all try not to assume intent that isn't stated.

Sometimes people are just talking about their own experiences. And they should be completely allowed to do so.

Birth control causing depression (even significant depression) is not rare. But fucking nobody talks about it. It's okay to be a feminist and pro birth control and still talk about its side effects. And this doesn't just apply to birth control either - there are many drugs that you can experience extreme side effects from. You are allowed to talk about it your personal experiences with that. And fuck all of the people who call you anti-science when you do...

(I can't believe that I need to say this but don't stop taking a drug because I wrote this. Please talk to a professional first and always. As I said, not anti-science)

[elminx]

It's amazing to me how many people think that they can be armchair scientists (especially about vaccines/the 'rona stuff) and THEY HAVE NEVER EVEN TAKEN 1 ADVANCED SCIENCE CLASS.

Bro, you don't even UNDERSTAND science.

You think it's a fixed thing. You think science has answers.

You don't get the science is the process. Science is getting it wrong and correct your mistakes. Science is learning something new and having to rewrite the textbooks.

THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT.

"The scientists were wrong" doesn't disprove science. The fact that we know that the scientists were wrong IS science.

[elminx]

That witchy urge to just rant at everybody that I know about my plants but only by using their first names and with no explanations.

[elminx]

My body manages to go through some pretty intense hoops to make sure that I am always bleeding during the full moon. I'm only four months off of a pretty intense dose of hormonal birth control which stopped my period altogether, and yet, somehow, my body has managed to resink itself with the moon.

As a person who both loves to do moon magic and who has very bad periods, I am extremely displeased with myself...once again.

[elminx]

I am so deeply over the argument for why a certain correspondence exists being "I read it in a book".

If your book doesn't explain the reason for a correspondence, get a better book. If a blog post doesn't explain the meaning behind a correspondence, find a different spell.

I'm not kidding. (and this is, as always, just my opinion - why do I always have to caveat this ffs)

Tulips are for love because I read it in a book. <-bad correspondence

Red tulips are for love because they are red. <-still pretty bad but at least you're trying now

Red tulips are for love because they resemble the human heart. <-Now you're getting somewhere. (do they though? Let's just keep going with this thought experiment either way)

I will use this red tulip, fill it with herbs, and sew it up to look like my lover's heart. <-Amazing.

[elminx]

The one thing that REALLY bothers me about a lot of witch content is the use or recommendation of hard-to-find botanicals (see also: ones that you need to order online or go to a specialty store for) with absolutely no explanation as to why that particular botanical is essential/more important than your standard kitchen herbs.

Don’t get me wrong - there are times when a big gun botanical is warranted and needed for a particular working but unless the writer explicitly says why, assume it’s not one of those times.

Most of the time, you can do most if not all of your magic with spices you can buy at your local grocer. Don’t overlook that in favor of exotic things - that’s just a waste of your money.

[elminx]

Not gonna lie, this is something that bothers me a lot and this is gonna turn into a rant.

Information has never been static. Ideas - even religious/spiritual ideas - have always been changing. We only think that past ideas of static because we are looking at texts of them and, if we're being really deeply honest, we can never actually prove that what we read in historical texts is accurate to the time period in which they were written.

Just like the many texts of religion and magic of today which all seemingly contradict each other - each author imposes their own ideas and biases onto the work.

I don't think that this is a bad thing because to defame it is to go against our very nature as human beings - it's just a reminder to keep in mind that all authors, even historical authors, had biases. And they didn't universally speak up for or have the singular understanding of the truth of any belief system - no more than any person has the right to do so today (looking at your, certain Tumblr authors...but I digress)

The idea that past texts of a religious or spiritual nature are more valid than ones written today is very suspect to me. You should apply the same amount of skepticism/discernment with which you would a modern text. This idealism of past seekers seems rooted in anti-modernism - as if somebody who lived closer to nature obviously understood it better. Except, you know what helps us to understand nature better? Science.

Unless you're gonna go on to be a flat earther, on some level you have to understand that as science and information evolves, so too, spirituality needs to evolve. To expect it to be static - to expect what was true for the life of an ancestor that lived even 200 or 300 years ago would be true for us today - seems to inherently false. We have better information. We should...use it? This is not an argument for throwing away sacred texts. This is an arugment against any person who writes that modern spiritual thought is "wrong" or "bad" or "misunderstood" because somebody who lived more than a century ago understood it differently. Technology changes everything that it touches (for good or ill) - somebody writing about psychism in the early 1900s could not have comprehended the way that the internet, carried around in our pockets, keeps us endlessly connected. That doesn't mean that their thoughts were wrong or bad, it just means that their thoughts represented their times.

And we don't live in their times. That is an indisputable fact. Read your spiritual texts but walk in the world that we live in. Do your magic in the world that we live in. Use the tools that our ancestors could never even have hoped for. Make your decisions with all of the knowledge that we have acquired because that is our birthright. We are human beings - we are ever moving forward. Do not be constrained by the limiting beliefs of the past. Remember that all thoughts change and evolve with time, culture, and understanding.

[elminx]

I saw elsewhere a thing about synastry (the study of how two people's charts interact with one another) and I wanted to reiterate here: synastry is complicated. There are no two people on earth whose charts, when combined, would be all positive or all negative.

Forget everything that you have ever read in a newspaper or pulp magazine about astrology.

At the least, in order to understand the base chances of two people being able to get along, you need to consider the aspects between their Ascendant, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars with the other person's Ascendant, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. That's 36 aspects you need to take into account at the most basic level to have any sense of possible accuracy.

And - we all have a history. Even if we might be technically compatible with a particular person, if we have trauma that they light up, we may hate them on sight. Or, conversely, even if we might be technically incompatible with a particular person, if we have trauma that they light up, we may run screaming towards every one of those red flags. Humans are complicated and we always have free choice.

For example and with apologies to the persons that I am speaking about (who will never read this):

One of my closest friends has only ever dated one person with which she was greatly astrologically aligned in the almost 20 years that I have known her. She gets attached easily and then struggles 3-5 years later with why it's not working out. I understand, from the perspective of synastry, that - in a long-term relationship - you need to want similar things (or be REALLY OPEN to your partner being VERY different from you).

The person who hates me the most in the world shares seven conjunctions between her natal birth chart and my own. That SHOULD be amazing synastry - that's the sort of synastry with which famous stories are written (it's Sun/Moon and Mars/Venus and then some). I was baffled because I really was like, hey this person is cool - we have a lot inc common and she just...made me enemy number one. It took me a while to figure out that she hates herself and that, because of our multiple conjunctions - I remind her of the things that she hates about herself.

Sometimes, if you are in your shadow, all you will see is your shadow.

TL:DR - Synastry is hella complicated but it does not negate lived experiences. If you haven't dealt with your personal trauma, no amount of potential compatibility will make a difference. We all have free will and many of us will make poor relationship choices - that does not mean that synastry is not valid or real.

[elminx]

The plants that you grow yourself will have a different energy than plants that you buy in the store.

The plants that you develop a relationship with will be different than the plants that you don't have a relationship with. ONE WAY to develop a relationship with a plant is to grow it yourself. For a lot of us, this is the easiest way. Caring for something - planting it from seed, watering it daily or weekly, naming it, watching it grow and flower, harvesting it - these are all ways to forge a connection.

But they are not the only way.

And that's important. You can develop a close relationship with a plant that you will never be able to grow yourself for any number of reasons. That doesn't make your relationship with that plant less than. That's reductive to say that it does.

AND, if you already have a close relationship with a plant, you can buy it in the store and still use it in your craft. Your relationship with a particular type of plant goes beyond the individual plant that you grew - it was the growing of that plant that developed that connection. But you don't lose that connection if your plant dies (if it was an annual) or goes dormant (if it was a perennial).

I have a strong relationship with Sweet Basil (you might guess that since I do call myself the Pesto Mystic). I prefer to grow my own basil - yes. That's mostly because the fresher that the basil is, the better it tastes. Basil doesn't survive picking well and oxidizes quickly. But I can buy basil in the store and it's still my friend. It still knows me. We still have that special relationship because I've developed that relationship over and over again through time - years of working with basil.

Basil is a good example of this because it is a small spirit. In that sense, I mean in comparison to a tree. My locust tree is a very big spirit in comparison to basil - she has a lot of presence, she "knows" me and I know her. Most garden herbs don't have that kind of presence. They are small plants - they don't live very long (in comparison to a tree). Sure, if I plant and tend basil in my garden, I will have a closer relationship with that basil and I like to foster that relationship. But my relationship with that basil will never be as strong as my relationship with my locust tree.

On the other hand, my relationship with Sweet Basil is very strong. It has been, as I said, developed over many years. But I also have that strong a relationship with Wormwood which I have never grown. (And I won't - it's highly invasive in my area)

Yes, I believe that nuance is important. But you need to look at all nuance and recognize (as I will repeat endlessly) that your truth is never universal.