#i personally don’t know very much at all about shintoism but i sure as fuck know you don’t climb the god damn torii gates

[moriphyte]

if i see one more video of some dumbass dancing at/on a literal shrine im gonna loose it they need to establish vatican level entrance rules for tourists who wanna visit shinto shrines i am so serious i would be happy to jump through whatever hoops i need to if jt stops these people from playing “who can be the most disrespectful piece of shit embarrassment to their home country?” by fucking DOING PULL UPS ON A TORII GATE like what is wrong with you for real would you run into fucking saint peter’s basilica and plank on the altar? no? THEN DONT FUCKING DO IT AT A SHINTO SHRINE JFC

[wordsofahoneybee]

ORGANIC HAUNTINGS FREE TO A GOOD HOME

PART I: GHOSTS AND GOD

Ghosts as a concept fascinate me. Humans are obsessed with the idea that, even after you die, there is something of you left behind. I don’t believe in ghosts, personally. It makes more sense to me that humans are so good at recognizing other people, that somewhere along the way we started finding them even when they aren’t really there. If we were being scientific, we’d call that a false positive. Like seeing faces in rocks and Jesus in burnt toast, we see the people we miss in creaking floorboards and flickering lights. I have friends that do believe in ghosts and have stories of seeing them, though, and I’m not about to call them liars. I have respect for what I don’t understand and cannot prove, and does it matter if they're real when they affect us just the same? I possess a sort of cognitive dissonance on the subject of ghosts in that respect. Ghosts aren’t real, but I believe my best friend when she tells me she and her father both saw the same shadowy old man hovering over their beds at night. 

Similar to ghosts, I also don’t believe in God. Except in a sort of abstract way that only someone raised by an ex-Catholic mother can. Meaning that God, if He does exist, is a right bastard and I tell Him this regularly. But mostly I don’t believe in God. Instead, I have my own off-brand flavor of spirituality; a delightful mix of optimistic nihilism and bastardized shintoism. This is a very pretentious way of saying nothing matters, so why the fuck wouldn’t we choose kindness? I think that life leaves something behind and that the something left behind deserves acknowledgement, even though I definitely do not believe in ghosts.

I wish ghosts were real (and that I believed in them). I think generally life would be much cooler if sometimes people decided to stick around after beefing it, but at 15% opacity. I also think my grief would be easier to hold if I believed my loved ones persisted After. Or maybe not. I’ve woken in the night more than once in a fit, hoping only that they aren’t cold. I’m not sure that logic or reasoning are effective weapons against mourning, but I would certainly give it a good effort. I would also obviously use the existence of ghosts to become a necromancer which would be --quite frankly-- fucking rad, and possibly have the added benefit of solving the cold problem. If God were real, I would put together a PowerPoint presentation and petition for Him to make ghosts real as well. Pros: Carrie Fisher and Betty White could potentially still be hanging out. Cons: my evil dead hamster could come back to kill me.

PART II: HAUNTINGS AND HORROR

I do believe in hauntings. I think of them as separate from ghosts, which I know is unusual. What’s also unusual is that I don’t believe hauntings require death. There are two kinds of hauntings in my mind: ones that are funny, and ones that are memories. The funny ones are mostly a joke; another way of acknowledging a liminal space in a cheeky wink-nudge way. Denny’s parking lots at 3am and abandoned farm houses are haunted, mostly because I think that would be hilarious, but also because they’re the kind of places you expect to be haunted. I think placebo hauntings still count, after all, ghosts aren’t real. The second kind of haunting is more genuine than this. I’ve found that there are some places that have been full of people or life for so long that they start to feel alive themselves. Childhood homes, old churches, historic sites; so much life has passed through that I find it hard to believe that it doesn’t have some kind of memory. It should not come as a surprise to learn that I am incredibly sentimental. I'm the kind of person that says hello to the ocean and greets the birds on my deck each morning. I often keep items I do not need or even want because throwing them away feels unkind. Like something alive within them will take offense at my abandoning them. It’s a childish belief, and in my mind, not so different from believing that the dead can haunt us. Which might make me a hypocrite, but I never claimed to be otherwise.

If ghosts were real, I think there are a couple of changes we would need to make as a culture on how we view them. Horror movies and ghost busting ‘reality’ shows give spirits a horrible rap. Don’t even get me started on Ouija boards. To this day I do not understand how a piece of cardboard branded by Hasbro could inspire so much fear in my friends. That being said, I know my horror movie plots and I’m not about to go tempting fate. 

I love the vibe of edgy horror and gothic chic as much as the next My Chemical Romance fan; I just don’t think graveyards and ghosts deserve to be labeled as something scary. Rot is disturbing, yes, and zombies set off a primal fear of disease and rabies that makes evolutionary sense, but graveyards are just a resting place for people we loved and ghosts are just people who didn’t get the memo that the party’s over and they need to go home. Popular ghost lore insists that spirits remain due to some unfinished business or strong emotion, but I refuse to believe that if our emotions are strong enough to hold us back from true death, only anger achieves it. I know of people who believe their passed family members stay and watch over them; a haunting made of love. That’s not scary, that’s your Great Grandma Gladys sticking around to slam the cupboards a bit.

We didn’t always think of ghosts and graveyards as scary, and plenty of cultures still don’t. In the early 20th century, Americans treated graveyards like public parks. People would spend afternoons on the grass among the dead in a cheerful affair, picnicking and generally having a good time. I for one believe we should bring this back, and not just because I view Mary Shelley as my personal hero. It’s been pointed out to me that cemeteries, for the most part, are public spaces, if people so chose they could go picnic there. My point is, when was the last time you saw families gathered on the ceiling of the dead for anything other than tragedy or a holiday? Ability is not in question, rather cultural willingness. 

I don't believe in an afterlife, but I do worry still that death might be lonely. Thinking about this for too long makes me feel silly, considering how greatly the dead outnumber the living, but as I said before, logic doesn’t work on grief. I do know, though, that the idea of sitting in a plot six feet under, preoccupied only with being forgotten scares me. 

PART III: LOVE AND THE UNIVERSE

Light travels at 186,282 miles per second through the vacuum of space. It takes over four years for the light from Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor, to reach us here on Earth. If for some reason, Proxima Centauri ever went out, it would take over four years for us to notice. For those four years, we would look up at the night sky and see a star that doesn't exist anymore. So, perhaps under certain circumstances, I do believe in ghosts.

"We are made of star stuff" to quote the late Carl Sagan. Billions upon billions of years ago, the first stars died in rapturous, scintillating fashion and their supernova corpses created the foundations of life. I am a firm believer in the romanticization of decay. If only for my own sake and peace of mind, I must believe there is something beautiful about the hunger of rot. Like passing down the name of a loved one, our bodies pass down their flesh to the earth.

When you bury a body, it creates a nutrient bloom; an overabundance of minerals causing a concentrated explosion of plant life. Death becomes another kind of life. This, I think, is why I’ve latched so tightly onto the idea of haunting as a kind of love. I want to think of ghosts as what happens to the leftover love we never got to give away, the parts that are scared of being alone; light from a long-dead star. I am a poet, though, and I think most things are about love in some roundabout way. 

So, really, what I mean when I say something is haunted is that there is love left behind. I mean that tombs are a kind of memory. They are I love you, I hope you rest well. They are I hope whatever comes After is kind. 

They are grass that grows that slightest bit greener, life persisting in the only way it knows how.

[trickstarbrave]

big hot topic on tiktok that has been talked abt often that i wanna throw my two cents in abt the discussion but will do so here bc its going to be way easier than condensing it in 60 seconds and ppl will get even more mad abt it on there. under a cut so you can just not look if you don’t want to as it’s probably long and no one likes this discussion 

disclaimer: im not jewish. culturally or religiously at all. so i do not have the best of insight of jewish folklore and i will mainly be repeating what i have heard jewish ppl say on it but you listening to jewish ppl on it will invariably be way more helpful. ultimately i am not talking to make an argument for or against lilith worship bc i can’t make that call, mainly just that arguments for it i see tend to be deeply flawed. ive seen jewish people who say they don’t care if people worship her and ive seen jewish people who are very much against it and frankly no one needs my non jewish ass giving them permission on it, i just don’t like some of the harmful arguments and at times BLATANT anti-Semitism i see in the discussions

“lilith isn’t a closed practice!!! she cant be closed!!! she’s a being/deity we can all recognize!!!”

this i feel starts with a misunderstanding of what “closed practice” means. a closed practice is a very broad term to describe any practices, typically spiritually in nature that are not freely shared 100% openly, usually due to trying to preserve cultural or religious practices. you can learn about most of them--if you go to a primary source. many people of closed practices are open about talking about it and teaching it to people who are interested, and some cannot due to years of oppression and theft of those said practices. some require initiation, and a lot of them are passed down with heavy cultural ties. and most importantly “closed practice” is a relatively new understanding of cultural preservation after colonization. 

judaism isn’t a ‘fully closed’ religion, but it does have a set conversion order in place, and typically while converting you will learn under a rabbi or teacher. a lot of jewish mysticism, magic, and folklore are passed down culturally, so even converts may take a very long time to learn all the ins and outs of it. and a lot of times jewish practices, beliefs, texts, and folklore has been wholesale stolen by western new-age spiritualists, occultists throughout the ages, and demonized by people who seek to harm jewish people as a whole. 

the pure fact of the matter is that unless you are learning from jewish people theres going to be a lot of things about lilith you don’t know. your understanding outside of the cultural jewish understanding of her is very different, yet you are the one who also constantly equates them as the same being with the same stories, with some modifications. yet time and time again whenever a jewish person would express anxiety over it (as she can be viewed as a very HARMFUL spirit to jewish people and not a deity for them) you talk over them and call them sexist, and when they try to correct you over misunderstandings of her stories you tell them you know more than them. 

with closed practices what doesn’t matter is your bloodline or your skin, it is about the information you have access culturally, and that information may be kept from people like you so that the faith in question can be preserved because it has been threatened. and yes, jewish people have had their cultural, spiritual, and religious practices threatened. it isn’t about keeping you out because they don’t like you, its about the fact that you don’t know everything and the way you are going to learn it will be difficult and very different. ive seen white voodou workers who are actual recognized practioners (sorry for the lack of proper terminology on this i know they have proper words/titles but i dont know them), and they didn’t just look up whatever they could find online, they had to seek out a priest to learn from, and it took a lot of time and training. 

there is a way to approach closed religious/spiritual practices, and someone saying ‘this is closed’ is not them saying ‘go away you cant even look at or be interested in this thing it is not for and never will be for people like YOU’. and ultimately HOW you go about approaching it will be decided by someone in that culture, and not however you feel would be the best way to do it as an outsider.

“how could so many people, if they aren’t actually contacting the “real lilith” be wrong? if shes from a closed practice she couldn’t reach out to so many people right? so they aren’t doing anything disrespectful” 

spirits, deities, and other entities from closed practices do reach out to outsiders on occasion and the correct course for dealing with that is to immediately find a person of religious/spiritual authority and trying to work with that person to better understand why. again the point above: you do not have the cultural knowledge to work with them, you do not understand how to identify them, what practices best suit them, the multitudes of stories around them, and history of them working with humans. if you actually value them as an entity it is imperative you understand from a PRIMARY source all of this information, not just second and third hand accounts of outsiders. 

and also a lot of colonizers have claimed to be personally connected or contacted by entities from a closed practice and use that as an excuse to not only not learn, but speak as an authority figure about them. there are people who claim to work with shinto spirits with absolutely 0 actual knowledge on shintoism yet feel like they have an authority to speak on it. there are people who claim to have been contacted by voodou, hoodou, and vodun spirits/entities and know nothing about it yet speak as authority figures on it. i’ve seen someone do it for a polynesian god. they did not care about actual learning, they cared about their own beliefs, validating those said already existing beliefs, and getting validation online. am i saying everyone is doing this with lilith? no. but saying “people wouldnt just lie/be wrong right?” yeah. yeah it happens all the time. 

“they don’t even like her, they fear her, she’s a demon to them and is actually from babylonia, we are NOT worshipping the same version as her and they don’t even want anything to do with her so why does it matter” 

in terms of actual cultural study a lot of jewish and christian stories are born from the cultures their people have had contact with. historically yes, jewish people have been in babylonia, assyria, and that area, and have made cultural exchanges with those people. a lot of cultural sharing has occured throughout history, but the jewish tellings of the stories have particularly jewish cultural knowledge and heritage in them. also we frankly do not have a lot of concrete surviving stories of lili, lilu, and lilitu, so i know you are not basing the meat and bones of your practice on those unless you have access to that cultural knowledge that not even archaeologists and anthropologists even know exists. most of it is on middle ages mysticism that developed her further based on jewish folklore and religious stories. 

also just because a culture doesn’t worship and revere a spirit doesn’t mean it is yours for the adopting and taking. we see this with the cannibalistic spirit i will not name from algonquin tribes and shapeshifting spirits/witches i also will not name from navajo. these are not spirits you’re supposed to mention or talk about, and even more so because their culture has such intense, negative stories around them means you should probably give it a little more thought. 

the last point i am going to make is the general, overt anti-semitism i see. stop comparing judaism to christianity. stop saying they are evil and misrepresent her because judaism is inherently sexist. stop saying they are oppressing your culturally christian raised ass. stop saying jewish people have no culture of their own and its “all stolen from pagan traditions” (which are somehow all equally open for you to take from too i suppose, as though middle eastern practices are exactly the same cultural weight as all white european ones)

again im not for the forceful closing of practices and i cannot give you fucking permission as i sure as shit do not know but i don’t think any of you even understand what “closed practice” means and why jewish people might have even the slightest misgivings about you working with or worshipping her and it really shows. if you have been heavily studying the occult, jewish traditions, and are doing so respectfully then i sure as hell am not here to argue with you about it so don’t come at me for it. what i am saying is a lot of people who do not have that and are absolutely disrespectful towards judaism and jewish people as a whole really keep making an ass of themselves on witchtok and are absolutely insufferable towards any jewish person who voices their thoughts and feelings on it, and i have a problem with that.