#fery draws

[ferydraws]

— We kidnapped a fucking (ballerina) vampire.

[rui-drawsbox]

doodle of the gfs before going to sleep

[jennablackmorebooks]

2010s called. #yolo

[kvroii]

A collection of previews of art I have drawn in this particular art style.

[arapa1ma]

new character just dropped (feri) (named after the flamboyant cuttlefish scientific name, ascarosepion pfefferi)

*BTW SHE IS NOT THE CUTTLEFISH THAT'S HER COMPANION, SHE'S A MAGICAL GIRL

[knxghtcore]

i can only imagine what stupid thing this mf would have said (/affectionate)

[luna-chan444]

I see y’all draw Irep/Feri like this:

And think he looks like this MF!!

For people who don’t know, that’s The Squip from Be More Chill the Musical, that’s some art of him.

[terminalkisser]

pls draw gabriel & fery,,,,, pls pls please,,,,, terminalkisser Hai :-)

theres no plan, theres no kingdom to come ill be your man if you got love to get done

[selfryed]

long awaited qna that i forgot to finish so here i am answering questions decades late while i procrastinate (will be under the cut bc nobody gaf so this is for the ppl who perhaps gaf) (some ppl wont be tagged since their questions probably got answered here!)

@underneath-the-oak-trees

-id say my artistic inspirations/influences are nephrosoupp and aprilshraga! my art is pretty based off of theirs, added my personal style, and combined it :-) but i will say i take inspo from loads of artists...my freeform board is insane

@bogos--binted

-early sunsets from bullets, house of wolves from tbp, thank you for the venom from tcfsr, and scarecrow from danger days!

@fantasticalleigh

-hey mama leigh 🗣️ id say my favourite movie is any volume of guardians of the galaxy gosh i love them

-fav snack is any cheezy....yum cheezits and cheetos 🤤

-my drawing setup is so basic im ngl....i use procreate and nephrosoupp's brushes for digital anddd i use a very old mechanical pencil from second grade + prismacolour coloured pencils + a lion shaped eraser

-MCMG MCMG MCMG and not only bc im hyperfixated on them, but mostly bc we r literally from the same city so id be able to relate to them a LOT id get w them so well srop....id hate to be around chelsea and tiffy tho like theyre both so cool but theyd so bully the hell out of me 😿

-if i was a wrestler (solo) my gimmick would be kind of historical if this makes sense? i remember i was coming up with designs and i think id be cool as a snobby, overly confident, rococo themed character because its so opposite from me irl

@traiitorjoe HEY POOKIE !!

-fav mcr song is probably cemetery drive....idk why and this might change soon but this song scratches the itch i constantly have in my brain

-i collect quarters that have US states on them and i do photography!

-i do not have any pets as i am so paranoid on how sad ill be when they pass away

@utterlyinsanee hey bestie who i actuallt hate /J

-for layouts i sometimes try to go for a fery medieval style with how they have very decorated boarders around the art !! for colours (this was in my tutorial) i just use a saturated yellow layer and many warm colours with cool coloured shadows :-) (but if the art is meant to be dark, i wont used saturation)

@ketchup-is-green

-theatre/broadway for sure 🌈🐬

-hesitant alien will forever be my fav i finally got that shit on vinyl and ill never be normal abt it i fear...just the vibe it gives off makes me wanna cry /pos

@all4rhea HEYYY 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

-ive been drawing since kindergarten :-))) i turned art into a hobby though around 3rd grade and thats when i started to try to improve more

[book-of-forbidden-knowledge]

Occult Book Reviews: The Crooked Path

[I'm sharing some of my old reviews from Quora because I will refer back to them in the new ones. This one is from 2023]

The next big field of magic on my list to study is folk magic. I realize I don’t know enough about folk magic. I’ve gotten it through the filter of Wicca, or through the PGM, but I don’t feel like I’ve absorbed much folk magic that I can actually… y’know… use. So much of folk magic seems impractical to me, utilizing ingredients I don’t have access to or being too Abrahamic for my taste. I haven’t done a lot of spellwork (in comparison to theurgy and the like), and most of what I have done is an awkward form of sigil magic. This is a shame, because spellwork was the reason I became interested in occultism in the first place! I stopped calling myself a witch because I didn’t do enough practical “low” magic for it to feel right, and it’s about time I learned it. I’m finally cycling back around to witchcraft, and this time I know what to search for. So, I’m starting off with The Crooked Path by Kelden, which is an introduction to Traditional Witchcraft. Traditional Witchcraft, at least how Kelden presents it, is mainly based in the British tradition of cunning folk. It’s spiritual, but also practical — very firmly rooted in the pragmatic application of magic. It’s hedge witchery. Kelden explains in the introduction how he was originally taken in by Wicca, but ended up forgoing it for the older and more irregular practice of Traditional Witchcraft. I have no idea if this will end up being my path, but it seems like a decent place to start.

Up until now, I’ve considered Traditional Witchcraft to be basically Wicca with the serial numbers filed off; I assumed it’s all the same sort of stuff, and certainly the same aesthetic, but without the doctrines and rituals that are specific to the religion of Wicca. This is not accurate. Though Traditional Witchcraft owes a lot to Wicca and related movements from the twentieth century, it owes just as much to folklore. I’m intrigued by the emphasis on developing a working practice out of folklore. I like that Kelden draws a distinction between drawing from historical sources, and drawing from folklore. Concepts like the Witches’ Sabbath, flying ointments, and familiar spirits are not necessarily grounded in any sort of historical tradition (especially if they come from confessions under torture), but knowing that, modern witches can still use these ideas to inform their practice.

Kelden associates three specific practices with Traditional Witchcraft: folk magic, hedge-crossing, and reverence for nature. This means that Traditional Witches perform practical magic, travel to the Otherworld to work with spirits, and work directly with the natural world. Kelden provides a brief but nuanced take on the role of religion (or lack thereof) in Traditional Witchcraft — not all witches are pagan, not all witches are theists, and many traditional spells are Christian or syncretic.* I breathed a sigh of relief, because I was afraid that this book was going to be based in a vague, wishy-washy Wiccanate paganism in the manner of Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard. I regret my initial assumptions, because I really sold Kelden short. This book is well-sourced. It references medieval and Renaissance-era Christian lore, upon which much of the cunning tradition is based. It contains a succinct but really interesting and useful history of modern witchcraft, describing the various witchcraft traditions that sprung up around Wicca. The only one I was previously familiar with was Feri; I’d never heard of 1734 or the Clan of Tubal Cain. I’d also never heard of Cecil Williamson, which is criminal. And there’s no airy-fairy, pseudo-historical nonsense about vaguely-defined ancient pagans worshipping the moon goddess!

Though Traditional Witchcraft still takes a lot of cues from Wicca, it is less like Wicca than I expected. Differences include a heavier emphasis on folklore as a resource, animism, more direct and personalized interaction with the natural world (as opposed to a standardized Wheel of the Year), and explicitly including baneful magic. Based on the information in this book, Traditional Witchcraft seems to “fix” many of my personal grievances with Wicca. For one thing, Traditional Witchcraft rituals tend to be more idiosyncratic than standardized, which works better for me. I’ve realized that I’m working “backwards” with respect to certain magical skills, and it’s far more productive to adapt techniques to suit the skills I already have than to try to force myself into a system that doesn’t work for me. Traditional Witchcraft rituals are also more ecstatic, in contrast to Wicca’s very ceremonial rituals. I definitely prefer the ecstatic kind. I quickly grew weary of rituals that consisted mainly of reading long verses out of a book or off of a website, and the stress of having to plan and set up rituals deterred me from doing them. Many of my own best rituals have been spontaneous. A more ecstatic practice also better suits the particular gods I work with.

Kelden does describe the gods associated with Traditional Witchcraft in similar duotheistic terms. This book’s discussion of theurgy is brief, simplistic, and still very Wiccan. But it also makes the point that many witches have differing conceptions of divinity (or none at all), which is reassuring. I’m very tired of the Horned God/Triple Goddess, but Kelden has one of the most interesting takes on this concept that I’ve seen in years. He comes right out and says that the Witch Father (which is what he calls the Horned God) is the Devil. By this, he means that the folkloric conception of the Devil is more intrinsically associated with witchcraft than any other entity. The Devil has some very pagan dimensions, even on his own. Regardless of however much the Devil has been directly influenced by pagan deities, he occupies the same “space” in folklore that would have been filled by trickster deities in a pre-Christian context. He assumes whatever roles and aspects that the Christian God won’t touch. That doesn’t mean that Kelden or that any other Traditional Witch is necessarily a Satanist, but it does mean that the Devil in folklore informs the Traditional Witch’s conception of the masculine Divine. I really, really like this. It’s a nice middle ground between Margaret-Murray-ism and the edginess of Satanism. Everything Kelden said about the characterization of the Witch Lord (a bringer of enlightenment, tricksterish, likes dance and sexuality, dual-natured, both frenzied and somber, associated with life and death, represents the Shadow and primal aspects of the psyche) resonates for me, because that’s Dionysus. Much of what he said about the Witch Mother also resonated — that she facilitates initiation, that she presides over birth and death, and that she is a cosmic wellspring from which the universe is generated. Despite how jaded I have become with the duotheistic model, I am starting to warm up to these archetypes again, swinging back around to them after having been devastated by the amount of modern constructs and outright fabrications that surround them. The two gods I’m closest to, Dionysus and Hecate, embody these archetypes perfectly — even in their original forms.

Traditional Witchcraft is more ethically neutral than Wicca (or at least, mainstream Wicca) because it is grounded in the folk magic of disenfranchised people who didn’t have any other way of standing up for themselves. Kelden emphasizes that one should not haphazardly cast curses, hexes, banishments, and bindings, but that one should always know how to cast them if the need arises. This dual approach to magic is appealing to me. Turns out I actually know much more about folk magic than I thought I did, because all of the techniques that Kelden outlines are ones I’m familiar with. I wish he went into more detail about how to adapt historical spells into modern ones, because that’s where I feel I have the most trouble, but it may be that I’m overthinking it. I really like having the examples of workable spells that have been derived from these older sources.

Like most witchcraft books, this one describes the method of hedge-crossing to be quieting down one’s body and mind through deep breathing exercises, to trigger an Out-of-Body-Experience. I’ve never had an OBE, not even once. This led me to believe that I’m incapable of hedge-crossing, when I’m actually really, really good at it. I just have a weird way of doing it. Quieting my body and mind down makes me more aware of my physical discomfort and more present in the real world. I travel to the Otherworld when I pace, or otherwise keep my body occupied with repetitive movement. I’ve had some pretty spectacular experiences like this, and I’m working on structuring my practice around them. I’ve even experienced the “Witches’ Sabbath” in meditation before, which I realized while reading this book. (Just like with the Devil, Kelden puts a positive spin on the concept of a “Witches’ Sabbath,” describing it as an otherworldly festival attended by witches and various types of spirits. You can go there to do business with spirits, perform magic, or just have fun.) I still hope to have an OBE someday, but if I don’t, I understand I’m not missing anything. Because of my unconventional methods, I don’t know how to explain hedge-crossing to newbie practitioners, so I’m glad I now have this book as a resource to point to. I also really appreciate the recipe for non-toxic flying ointment.

The final section of this book is about communing with nature, which I have something of an ambivalent relationship with. On the one hand, I scoff at the notion that paganism in general is “nature-based.” Paganism thrived just as well in ancient metropolises that celebrated their “dominion” over nature. And there are so many different varieties of paganism, that generalizing them all as Druid-stereotype tree-hugging is, at best, reductive. On the other hand, I do really like being in nature. It improves my mental health. I ended up spending a lot of time in the nearby forest at my school. And, I distinctly remember that the most witchy I have ever felt was when I was dancing in my front yard with a hoop made from a wisteria vine. I haven’t been as interested in the wortcunning side of witchcraft, but I won’t pretend that the natural world holds no interest for me or has no relevance to my practice. As a child, I built fairy-houses in nearby trees and left food offerings. Who says I couldn’t do that now? I think my biggest hurdle is that I see local plants as mundane and boring in comparison to mandrake and mugwort, so I don’t really know how to magically engage with them. Kelden has some great advice about how to discover the “virtues” (correspondences) of native plants, rocks, and animals, and about how to safely work with poisonous plants for baneful magic. I also appreciate his advice about adapting the Wheel of the Year to suit your own seasonal patterns and landscape, as well as the spiritual/cultural associations that are actually important to you — no sense in celebrating agricultural or pastoral milestones if you’re not a farmer or a herder! Kelden closes off the book with a short chapter about how to actually apply all of the information in the book. Not enough beginner books do that. Establishing a regular practice is still something I haven’t quite gotten down, so even though it’s a short little section, any help is welcome.

Color me impressed! I liked this book more, and got more out of it, than I expected. I loved how accessible it was. It was a really easy and fast read (this is the quickest I’ve gotten through an occult book in a while). Kelden does a great job of distinguishing where all these different ideas or practices come from — which bits of folklore, which preexisting occult traditions, which primary sources, when it’s UPG, etc. The Crooked Path somehow walks the line between having just enough specificity to not feel generic (i.e. it’s a guide to a particular tradition), and being universally applicable enough to work for people of different creeds and locales. There are some things I would change: Kelden could have included more advice about how to connect with the natural world when one lives in a completely urban environment, and the Otherworld chapter could have used a section dedicated to Shadow Work. But this is still one of the best and most accessible beginner books I’ve read in a long time. I’m definitely going to start recommending it as a non-denominational intro-to-witchcraft book, of which there aren’t many.

Not that it’s bad to start with Wicca, but you have to know that’s what you’re doing; my biggest problem with Wicca 101 books is that most of them make certain beliefs/practices/approaches seem universal when they’re actually distinctly Wiccan, or draw no distinction between Wicca and witchcraft: “Witches” worship the Horned God and the Moon Goddess. “Witches” celebrate the eight Sabbats and Full/Dark Moons. “Witches” cast the circle and perform the Great Rite with the chalice and blade. “Witches” greet each other with “Blessed Be” or “Merry Meet,” and seal every spell with “so mote it be.” “Witches” follow the Rede. All of these things are features of Wicca specifically, but you have to know enough to be able to separate out the distinctly Wiccan aspects from everything else. As a neophyte who lacked that prior knowledge, I took all these things as a given. Early on, I frequently parroted “Wicca is a religion, witchcraft is a practice.” But somewhere along the line, I realized I didn’t know what that practice actually was. Wicca and witchcraft were so intertwined in my mind that I didn’t know what witchcraft looked like independently from Wicca. Traditional Witchcraft is still a specific path with its own history and associated practices, but it gives me a good idea of what “witchcraft” looks like on its own. It cuts out all the "pomp” of the Golden-Dawn-esque ceremonialism and focuses only on the “low magic” stuff, giving me a better sense of what “witchcraft” is at its core, and providing me with a framework that I can more easily adapt.

This book got me feeling witchy again, which is saying a lot. This is the most excited about witchcraft I’ve been in years, and Traditional Witchcraft scored a lot of points with me. I’m not comfortable with every aspect of it, but it gives me the freedom to change the things that don’t work for me. I read descriptions of other Traditional Witchcraft books on Amazon, and most of them also emphasized formulating an authentic and personalized craft based on one’s own environment. I wouldn’t expect something called “Traditional” to be so idiosyncratic; that seems a bit oxymoronic, but it’s also comforting and promising. If you’re a beginner and you’re interested in witchcraft, I highly recommend getting this book (or other books on Traditional Witchcraft) in addition to Wicca 101 books. That way, you can see what your options are, and select or combine practices as you see fit.

*Note: The top critical review on Amazon is written by a person who seemed utterly appalled that so many of these traditional spells have God or Jesus or the Devil in them. That person does not seem to know very much about traditional British and American folk magic. If you have an anti-Abrahamic bias, I encourage you to put it aside when studying any kind of historical or historically-inspired folk magic (or ceremonial magic, for that matter). You can adapt these old Christian spells to suit any religion or spiritual tradition, and Kelden says as much.

[ferydraws]

I support women’s wrongs

[silverthornwitchery]

My Experiences With The Horned God

Ok goes without saying but this is my own experience, my upg. Whether or not things are historically accurate is NOT my concern with this post. I am simply documenting my experiences. I am also NOT a reconstructionist, I am an Eclectic Neo-pagan that draws inspiration from NUMEROUS sources.

In my experiences Worshipping The Horned One and The Goddess, they're definetly like, the Primary Godheads/Energy Archetypes of the universe/nature.

My experiences with the Horned One aligns pretty well with Feri tradition, albeit he's a bit more Faceted for me.

I Experience Him as The Lightbringer, The Lord of the Forest, and The Royal Darkness/The Arddu. I'll go into Detail Below:

The Lightbringer - The Solar and Illuminating aspect of the Horned God. This form of him is the divine rebel, and very much into embracing the joys of life and pleasure. I Break the Lightbringer down into two more facets: The Blue God, and The Solar God. Both are relatively similar but to me the Blue God (this name stems from Feri) is the more esoteric and taboo aspects of light, and The Solar God is the more nature based and wild aspects of the sun itself.

The Names I use currently for these are Oberon for the Blue God, and in the past for the Solar God I've called upon Apollo and his various celtic forms, but I can't seem to find a name that sticks. I've also used Lucifer for the Lightbringer as a whole, but I'm trying to frame this side of my practice in English and Celtic folklore specifically for sake of ease. I am including things like Shakespeare, Arthurian Legends, and so on in this.

The Lord Of The Forest - This tends to be the popularized form of the Horned God. Fertility, Nature, Animals, Magic, the Cycle of Life and Death. He is blending of both the LightBringer, and The Arddu. The Lord of the Forest is a seasonal God. With the Oak King being his Spring and Summer forms, and the Holly King being his cthonic Fall and Winter forms, but name wise, I use three.

Cocidius/Callirius being the more human form of this God. Mostly human aside from ears and antlers or horns.

Herne is the Median between human and Animal, primal yet civilized, he is at least to me, 50/50 in terms of man and beast, but can shift between either pending what you are doing. The way he manifests to me and his energy feels is basically Hircine from TES, and I have worked with him under that name in the past.

Cernunnos to me is the Animal aspect of him. He speaks through nature itself, and is the large stag in the woods. He is cthonic, he is liminal, he is primal. He is the green forest itself in the warm seasons, and the dead and rebirthing forest in the cold. Cernunnos is the masculine embodiment of nature itself.

The Arddu - The Dark/Shadow aspect of the Horned God. He is the master of the Witches Sabbath, the embodiment of death, decay, and the shadow. Since he is death he is also rebirth and transformation. He is not malevolent, actually quite the opposite, but he is not opposed to destroying things to rebuild them, nor is he opposed to baneful workings in any ways. The Arddu as I understand him, often appears as a humanoid black goat or Stag with a candle lit between his horns. Sometimes his head is a skull, sometimes it is not. Sometimes he is more human in appearance. Regardless, The Arddu fulfills the role of "folk devil" in my own practice, though I've moved away from calling him that, as Arddu, meaning Dark One, feels more natural to me. Though I am not against, and actually quite enjoy the reclamation of the word Devil.

The Arddu comes to me in two colors, Black and White.

Black is the color of the fertile soil, which is made that way through decay. Black is the color of the shadow, the subconscious, and the taboo. That which we as people are taught to fear, but once embraced gives us immense power. In this form he's been coming to me as Arawn, but also in the past has come to me as Sathanas and the archetypal Sabbatic Goat. He dons the skull of either a Stag, Ram, Wolf, or Goat, or has those skulls for his actual face.

White is the color often associated with the otherworld, and the Wild Hunt. The White Arddu is the Light Betwixt the Horns and the winter snows. He is faery king in essence. To me he manifests in a more humanoid form, and is very fae-like. He is a trickster, a teacher, and a phantom.. to me he appears as Gwyn Ap Nudd, and I understand Gwyn and Arawn to be two sides of the same coin in my path.

[jennablackmorebooks]

I've been drawing characters from Rainbow again lately.

(From the beginning: Mae Chouko, Keiko Arlot, Kaio Asgell, Miya Solstice, Shay Turner, Rega Asgell, and Aichi Arlot).

[severalpinkribbons]

Welcome my lovely little patients

About the Head nurse that owns said safe haven ༊*·˚

୨⎯ "About Dr. Feri" ⎯୧ ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧ Trigender, I don't care what pronouns you use for me ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧ Omnisexual + Demisexual ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧ Diagnosed BPD, Depression, Autism ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧ Age regressor ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧ Witchcraft practitioner

Terms and conditions, please sign~

No kink/nsfw/associated in my hospital, any attempts will be blocked immediately

Flirting is allowed

Anons are accepted and welcome here x.___________________

CAUTION: You are entering a restricted area

This blog will be for my yandere thoughts and things. There may be some serious topics; each post will have it's own trigger warning for extra protection. Still sensitive dolls should enter into a different hospital for their own safety.

Thank you for sticking with me sweets and we hope you enjoy your stay! <3

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈-------------------------------------------------------

#ribbons lab results ~ Fun tests and games

#ribbons lab reports ~ Yandere ramblings

#ribbons patients ~ Chatting w/frens

#ribbons meds check ~ Other talking/rambling

#pretty pink ribbons ~ Drawings/art

#paging doctor ribbons ~ Poems

#ribbons mental hospital - Anons

#ribbons reblogs - Reblogs

Patients:

💟

Secondary (mainly) anime blog!

[acorpsecalledcorva]

Hello yes please I'd love a post about possession and mediumship and how they may or may not relate to plurality actually

Sigh...like, I guess, but I have to preface this by saying this is such a huge huge subject so this won't even scratch the surface. Possession and mediumship has been a persistent and global phenomena throughout all of human history, with each belief system having a unique and rich history that each deserve their own examination and exploration. In fact the inspiration for doing the research was seeing two sentiments in the community that kept rubbing me the wrong way being firstly "the reason there's no records of endogenic plurality is because someone might think you're possessed by a demon and perform a violent exorcism on you" and secondly "the DSM and ICD recognise Mediumship and spirit possession as a form of endogenic plurality" which aren't necessarily completely wrong when you look into it, I just think are incredibly incredibly lazy and culturally insensitive gotchas.

Demonic possession is actually a very specific phenomena which different religions have different beliefs and approaches on how to spot and what to do about it, but other forms of communication with, or connection to, non benevolent spirits was widely accepted. Even in Christianity in Europe, which I guess is what we would all immediately think of when we hear 'demonic possession', there is the Cult of Saints that existed for over a millennia. There's actually a few accounts of demonic possession that retrospectively we can say with certainty match the symptoms of DID, but really this is down to the meticulousness of the records being kept, which anyone who's researched witch trials knows can suck ass the majority of the time.

The first documented case of dissociative identity disorder (DID) was in 1584. Though not labeled such at the time, Jeanne Fery recorded her exorcism in detail (with additional details provided in the records of her exorcists), preserving documentation of symptoms that exactly match those that are found in individuals with DID today. She had multiple alters, each with their own name, identity, and identifying features and had alters that would today be described as an ISH, persecutory protectors, and child alters. Her alters were associated with actions that ranged from helping her to heal to self harm and disordered eating, were audible inside her head, and could take control of her body to allow for various actions, conversion features, and changes in knowledge and skills. The alters resulted from childhood physical and possibly sexual abuse. Jeanne Fery was actually called ”the most perfect case” of “dédoublement de la personnalité,” the most perfect case of DID, by Bourneville, the man who reissued a book about her life in 1886 (van der Hart, Lierens, Goodwin, 1996).1

But when it comes to endogenic plurality as being something non pathological, or non benevolent, it's harder to draw the same kind of parallels between endogenic plural experiences that we see and hear about today with something like the Cult of Saints while you can draw several parallels between the Cult of Saints and other practices around the globe. Also interestingly, while there's very little written about endogenic plurality, there's a metric fuck tonne written about spirit possession and mediumship. So can you take that humongous body of research, scratch out "spirit possession" and "mediumship", and write in Endogenic Plurality? Fuck no, and it would be insanely racist to try.

What we can do though, is identity and categorise commonality between them and see what insights we can gather about humanity as a whole.

To that end, these beliefs and experiences can be summed up thusly:

Voluntary Possession - usually involving some kind of trance induction, a specific entity such as a spirit, someone who's died, an angel, or a deity briefly inhabits the body for a limited time for a specific purpose, usually providing some kind of insight or perform an act of healing

Involuntary Possession - these are your demons and your devils, often accompanied by a deluge of physical and psychological symptoms such as convulsions and outbursts of rage

The Ouchies - these are bad spirits that don't possess you so much as they hang around and play mischief with your body, causing ailments and issues that aren't medically explained. Nowadays we call them somataform disorders but we used to call them hysteria as well until like the 80s.

And The Voices of Temptation - these are the devils and demons that whisper in your ear from within, tempting you to perform socially unacceptable behaviours like kissing boys and drinking too much wine.

One outlier of this that I really don't know enough about is the Jinn of Islamic faiths.

Jinn are much more physical than spirits.[31] Due to their subtle bodies, which are composed of fire and air (marijin min nar), they are purported to be able to possess the bodies of humans. Such physical intrusion of the jinn is conceptually different from the whisperings of the devils.[32]: 67  Since jinn are not necessarily evil, they are distinguished from cultural concepts of possession by devils/demons.[33] Since such jinn are said to have free will, they can have their own reasons to possess humans and are not necessarily harmful. There are various reasons given as to why a jinn might seek to possess an individual, such as falling in love with them, taking revenge for hurting them or their relatives, or other undefined reasons.[34][35] At an intended possession, the covenant with the jinn must be renewed.[36] Soothsayers (kāhin pl. kuhhān), would use such possession to gain hidden knowledge. Inspirations from jinn by poets requires neither possession nor obedience to the jinn. Their relationship is rather described as mutual.

And honestly, that sounds really really fascinating, I need to look into that much more cause wow I did not know that.

On the subject of voluntary trance possession, the best candidate for finding signs of Endogenic Plurality, rather than the potential DID of involuntary Possession, there's actually been a lot of research into this. Several attempts have been made by the medical community to pathologise voluntary possession and they've largely failed. Like at the core of it, that's why these are listed in the ICD and DSM, because we tried to explain them medically and couldn't because these practices are rarely detrimental to the practitioner, they don't constitute a disorder. There's also been some choice comments by medical professionals where they essentially blame the belief on the inherent inferiority and suggestibility of the (poc) practitioners mind.

Viewed through a psychophysiological lens there's actually been quite a bit of scientific research into the biological function of trance and possessive states and we do actually see changes in brain area activation and activity, very similar in fact to that of hypnosis. Induction into a trance state often involves the use of rhythmic drum beating, group dancing, or the use of psychotropic herbs, so called ecstatic practices.

Mediums often score highly in certain specific criteria of the Dissociative Experiences Scale but low on others and tend to score better than average on mental health scores. So are they a potential example of Endogenic Plurality? Well Endogenic is more of a self identity label where one defines themselves as being 'more than one' in some way and you find very few accounts of mediums describing themselves in this way. The spirits they channel do not exist within them outside of trance rituals, but rather come from another plane of existence temporarily connecting with our realm through the medium.

However! There may be a parallel to be drawn between the brain activity of a trance state and the auto Hypnotic model of Paul Dell. Not everyone is capable of trance and possession, just as not everyone is capable of plurality or developing DID, but they all might use the same mechanism. The same mechanism that leads to psychosomatic symptoms and the placebo effect, behind Mesmerism and hysteria.

The way that this mechanism manifests might very well be sociocognitive in nature, being used and utilised in different cultures in different but very measurable and real ways. As such I think the most we can really say that these practices and experiences are linked to plurality, and there may very well be some individual and isolated cases of plurality in these practices, but that we shouldn't overwrite and erase what these practices are within their own contexts and definitely shouldn't be using them as rhetorical arguments and gotchas, that's the devil of colonialism on your shoulder talking and you should not be listening to him

[neonblixtar]

🪷 for leo, 🎲 for max, 👛 for nikita, 🦑 for julian, 🚬 for teto, ♟️ for ivett, 🦤 for imre, 🪱 for feri, 🦪 for flo!

thank you!! i had a lot of fun with this

LEO

🪷 what gives this character inner peace?

a lot actually! taking and developing photos, drawing, going around town, just sitting in a bar, maybe talking to people maybe not, he likes to fill his life with things that give him peace since that hasn't always been a choice he's had

MAX

🎲 are they lucky?

no, in fact he's the opposite he's always the one getting his ass beat first

NIKITA

👛 what is always with this character?

a knife and a sketchbook

JULIAN

🦑 any pets?

the housekeepers have had two dogs since he was a child so not exactly his pet but close enough, he's not really an animal person though he prefers plants and microorganisms

TETO

🚬 smoking/drinking habits? signature brand or drink?

he does both quite a lot! idk enough about different cigarette brands but he definitely has Opinions, his senses r better than those of humans so he's like, smelling/tasting shrimp scents in these things, alcohol is stuff like rum nd whiskey, hell pull out really expensive ones to intimidate people

IVETT

♟️ how would they play chess if they would?

Very confusedly, i mean shed try to concentrate and get a hang of it but just lose interest after a while, she is Not one for, well, strategic thinking, she always leaves that to teto

she definitely has a bunch of pretty, antique chessboards as decoration though, and at least one of those little tables with an inbuilt board

IMRE

🦤 are they particularly smart in any way? how so?

he's really good at baking, like including all the chemistry, dough hydration, etc

FERI

🪱 would they stop to move a worm off the pavement/save it?

no, he would not

FLO

🦪 how would they describe their gender if asked?

"princess with a baseball bat"